By
Mary Elizabeth Dallas
MedicineNet.com
Originally
published on September 18, 2012
Over
the past decade, off-label use of antipsychotic drugs has increased among
children enrolled in Medicaid, according to a new study representing 35 percent
of children in the United States.
Off-label
drug use is a term used to describe when drugs are prescribed using a dosage,
type of dosage or for a purpose that hasn't yet been approved by the U.S. Food
and Drug Administration.
In
the study, researchers from the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia found a 62
percent jump in the number of publicly insured children between the ages of 3
and 18 taking antipsychotics. In 2007 alone, 65 percent of the 354,000 children
on these drugs were taking them for uses that have not been approved by the
FDA, the investigators pointed out.
"We
knew that the number of children prescribed antipsychotics had grown steadily
over the past two decades, particularly among children with public
insurance," study author Meredith Matone, a researcher at PolicyLab, said
in a hospital news release. "With this study, we wanted to learn more
about why these drugs are being used so often, what diagnoses they're being
used to treat, and how prescribing patterns changed over the course of the last
decade."
