Survey on Accidental or Overdose of Medicines in Pediatrics and Construction and Utilization of an Over-the-Counter Drug Information Search Tool

In recent years, overdose of over-the-counter drugs, which are easily available for purchase by the general public at drug stores or on the Internet, by young people has become a social problem. When a patient who has overdosed or mistakenly ingested a drug comes to the hospital, the necessary drug information is collected from poisoning-related books and package inserts, poisoning information from the Japan Poison Information Center, and other sources. However, although the package inserts of over-the-counter drugs contain information on dosage and active ingredients, they do not contain information on pharmacokinetics or toxicity; therefore, these must be looked up separately. In emergency outpatient clinics, where urgency is high, the time it takes to obtain information has been an issue. To enable a rapid response, we collected information on the toxicity of 61 ingredients contained in over-the-counter drugs in advance and then used Microsoft® Office Access® to link the active ingredients of 64 general cold medicines and 34 antipyretic analgesics among over-the-counter drugs with information such as the half-life and toxic dose of the ingredients, creating a system that allows simultaneous searches. This shortened the time required to collect drug information and standardized the information provided. We believe that using this system to provide drug information is useful in terms of speed and accuracy.