Children Receive Inappropriate Treatment..

Almost one in five children treated for acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) does not receive the appropriate chemotherapy regimen due to medication errors, according to a new study.

The study reveals that 10 percent of chemotherapeutic medications for outpatients were prescribed or administered incorrectly. Though most were of little clinical significance, in some patients the errors may have put the patients at risk either for relapse or for overdose-related complications.
In the United States medical errors cause up to 98,000 hospital deaths per year - more deaths than by motor vehicle accidents and breast cancer combined. Medication errors are attributable to almost 7,000 inpatient deaths.

Medication errors in the outpatient setting are thought to be some of the most common medical errors, but they are not well-studied, particularly in children.. However, most mistakes among outpatients are caught before drugs are given to patients, and because most drugs have wide safety ranges, most errors are benign.

Children with cancer, however, receive extremely toxic drugs with narrow safe dose ranges and must be prescribed according to specific, sometimes complex, protocols.

Led by James A. Taylor, M.D. of the University of Washington and Children's Hospital and Regional Medical Center in Seattle, researchers studied the rate and types of medications errors that occur in children receiving outpatient chemotherapy regimen for ALL. The authors reviewed the administration of drugs and the medications prescribed and dispensed to 69 enrolled patients.

This study identified a 10 percent error rate in outpatient chemotherapy regimens for children with ALL. "It is possible that the efficacy of treatment regimens is reduced or toxicity increased because not all children are receiving the chemotherapeutic agents as indicated," said Dr. Taylor. Moreover, the authors recommended, "in designing new [chemotherapy] protocols, a balance needs to be struck between the precision of dosing regimens and simplification so that medication errors are minimized."

Edited by: Kevin Hart MA

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