From: Lee Daniel Crocker (lcrocker@mercury.colossus.net)
Date: Wed Apr 15 1998 - 16:09:50 MDT
> IAN: Important to note: the study seems only to have
> included drugs prescribed to hospitalized patients,
> yet I would expect that most prescription drugs are
> prescribed to patients NOT hospitalized. If 5% of
> hospitalized patients prescribed a drug will die
> from that drug, and if hospital prescriptions
> account for (just a guess) 20% of all prescriptions,
> then there could be upwards of 500,000 people dying
> every year from prescription drugs (just a guestimate)!
I doubt the number would extrapolate that simply;
patients in a hospital are statistically more ill than
those not hospitalized, so are more likely to die from
an ADR (because they were closer to death already).
I suspect that the larger number (2 million ill from
ADR) might scale better.
-- Lee Daniel Crocker <lee@piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lcrocker.html> "All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past, are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC
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