TUESDAY, Aug. 4 (HealthDay News) -- The leading cause of accidental poisonings among American children can be found in the family medicine cabinet, a new government report shows.

Each year in the United States, more than 71,000 children aged 18 and younger are seen in emergency rooms for unintentional overdoses of prescription and over-the-counter drugs, the researchers found.

In fact, more than two-thirds of emergency department visits are due to poisoning from prescription and over-the-counter medications -- that's more than double the rate of childhood poisonings caused by household cleaning products, plants and the like, the team from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said.

"Medication overdoses are most common among 2-year-olds," added lead researcher Dr. Daniel Budnitz, director of the CDC's Medication Safety Program in the division of health-care quality promotion. "About one out of every 180 2-year-olds visits an emergency department for a medication overdose each year."

Dr. Robert Geller, a professor of pediatrics at Emory University School of Medicine and medical director of the Georgia Poison Center, said that "the number children seen in the emergency room due to overdoses that are unintentional or medication errors is remarkable."

Geller noted that many more people reach out to poison control centers for help than show up at the hospital. "Right now, poison centers are having their funding cut," he noted. "If poison centers are less available, the number of children going to emergency rooms will rise."

More than 80 percent of these overdoses are due to unsupervised ingestion, Budnitz noted. "Basically, it's young children finding and eating medicine without adult supervision," he said. "They are found with an empty bottle or pills in their mouth or something, and they are taken to the emergency department."

In addition, medication errors by caregivers or adults and misuse of drugs by preteens and teens cause about 14 percent of accidental poisonings, Budnitz said. "Basically, that's not following directions," he said.

The report appears online Aug. 4 in advance of publication in the September print edition of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

For the study, Budnitz's team used 2004 and 2005 data from the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System to estimate the number of emergency department visits resulting from unintentional medication overdoses for children aged 18 and younger.

The most common medications accidentally taken by children are acetaminophen, opioids or benzodiazepines, cough and cold medicines, nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) and antidepressants, Budnitz said.

To help reduce the number of incidents of unintentional poisonings, especially in younger children, Budnitz believes drug manufacturers must create better child safety caps, including caps that limit the dose that can be dispensed.

Currently, the CDC is working with over-the-counter drug manufacturers to encourage the implementation of new "passive" safety caps, Budnitz said. These caps do not require that the user to do anything but close it to work, or they allow only a measured dose to be dispensed at one time.

There is a need to improve packaging to cut the number of cases of unintended ingestion, Geller said. "If you could make it harder for a kid who came upon a package to get the contents of the package, it would make it more likely they would never need to go to the emergency room," he noted.

Of course, there are things that can be done right now by parents and caregivers, Budnitz said. These include making sure the cap is tightly secured after taking medication and placing the bottle well out of the reach of toddlers.

While many overdoses are accidental, the dangers of opioid use among teens is the subject of a new study in this month's Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine. That study, from University of Michigan researchers, found that pain relief is not the main reason that one in 10 high school seniors have tried opioid drugs. The most common reasons included relaxation, feeling good or getting high, experimentation and then pain relief. Students used drugs such as hydrocodone, oxycodone (Oxycontin), hydromorphone, meperidine, morphine and codeine without a prescription, the researchers found.

The dangers of misused cold medications for infants and young children has also been a topic of recent debate among experts. Following concerns raised by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, leading drug makers in October voluntarily withdrew oral cough and cold medicines marketed for use in infants.

The move affects only "infant" oral medicines, not those intended and labeled for use in children aged 2 and older. And it comes as U.S. regulators review the products' safety, following reports of dozens of deaths since 1969.

"The reason the makers of over-the-counter oral cough and cold medicines for infants are voluntarily withdrawing these medicines is that there have been rare patterns of misuse leading to overdose recently identified, particularly in infants, and safety is our top priority," Linda A. Suydam, president of the Consumer Healthcare Products Association, said in a statement at the time.

More information

For tips to prevent drug poisonings, visit the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

SATURDAY, Aug. 1 (HealthDay News) -- The key to a satisfying vacation may be to have fewer negative feelings about the trip, rather than having more positive experiences, a new study says.

Virginia Tech marketing professor Joe Sirgy says his research shows that the amount of satisfaction a traveler experiences during vacation is "strongly influenced" by the lack of negatives related to worries about health and safety -- such as getting sick, being tired or fretting about weight gain -- and financial issues, such as not overspending on or during the trip.

"Our results contradict the general belief that leisure travel affects an individual's life satisfaction through positive emotions related to health and safety, [such as] feeling relaxed, rested and mentally re-charged after the trip, or feeling healthier because the trip required physical activity," Sirgy, who specializes in quality-of-life studies, said in a news release from Virginia Tech.

He also found that people were happier if they felt the trip didn't drive them to the poor house and instead perceived that "the trip was well worth the money spent."

Sirgy's conclusions are based on a survey of more than 260 tourists asked about benefits and costs of travel and how those factors affect satisfaction in general and in relation to specific areas such as social, family or financial life.

More information

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has more about managing stress.

FRIDAY, July 31 (HealthDay News) -- A growing number of Americans now have a positive opinion on psychiatric medications, a new study contends.

About five out of six people surveyed felt psychiatric medications could help people control psychiatric symptoms, but many also expected the medications could help people deal with day-to-day stresses, help them feel better about themselves and make things easier with family and friends.

"People's attitudes regarding psychiatric medications became more favorable between 1998 and 2006," said study author Dr. Ramin Mojtabai, an associate professor in the department of mental health at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore.

Mojtabai expressed concern, however, that people's attitudes were increasingly positive, even in situations where there might not be a proven benefit to the drugs.

"My hope would be for people to be more discriminating in their views about the effects of these medications. I would hope they'd be more willing to accept them for treating panic and depression, but not for things like stress," he said.

Results of the study will be published in the August issue of Psychiatric Services.

Mojtabai wanted to assess American's opinions of psychiatric medications for a number of reasons. One is that the use of such medications has soared in recent years. Between 1990 and 2000, he said, the use of antidepressants increased fivefold. Another reason is that the government has allowed direct-to-consumer advertising for the drugs. And finally, he said that he wanted to learn if the recent FDA black box warnings on some antidepressants and antipsychotics had any effect on people's opinions of these drugs.

Using data from the U.S. General Social Surveys from 1998 and 2006, Mojtabai compared the two periods to examine people's attitudes toward psychiatric medications.

The initial sample for 1998 included 1,387 people, while the 2006 survey included 1,437 people. Both groups included slightly more females than males. More than 70 percent of both groups were white, and more than half had more than a high school education.

In 1998, 84 percent of people agreed with the statement, "These medications help people control their symptoms." In 2006, that number had edged up slightly, to 86 percent.

By 2006, more people believed that psychiatric medications could help people feel better about themselves (68 percent vs. 60 percent), help people deal with stress (83 percent compared to 78 percent), and make things easier with family and friends (76 percent compared to 68 percent).

People were somewhat more willing to take these medications themselves: 29 percent in 2006 vs. 23 percent in 1998. Opinions about the drugs' potential adverse effects didn't change over time, according to the study.

Mojtabai said that advertising may have helped increased people's positive perceptions of these drugs. But, he added, there is also an increasing awareness that many psychiatric disorders have a biological or organic cause that medications may be able to help correct.

Dr. Norman Sussman, interim chairman of the psychiatry department at New York University Langone Medical Center, said that advertising has definitely played a role in people's perceptions of these drugs, noting that many people now ask him for medications by name. He added that another reason may be word-of-mouth endorsements from people who are taking these medications and have been helped by them.

"These drugs have become a part of our culture," Sussman said. "Fifty years ago, psychiatric drugs were something you'd take only if psychotherapy failed. Today, psychotherapy often isn't affordable, and the nature of treating symptoms has shifted toward medications. When these drugs work -- for anxiety, insomnia, depression, mania -- they can be miraculous for that person. But, none of them work universally."

More information

Learn more about medications for depression from the American Academy of Family Physicians  .

FRIDAY, March 20 (HealthDay News) -- The human brain functions on "the edge of chaos," at a critical point between order and randomness, according to U.K.-based researchers who said their finding could help improve understanding about cognitive performance and psychiatric disorders.

The researchers used medical imaging to measure changes in the synchronization of activity between different regions of the functional network in human brains and determined that the brain operates in a "self-organized critical state," according to a news release from PLoS Computational Biology. The study is in its March 20 issue.

Further research using computational models confirmed the conclusion. The models exactly reflected the profile the researchers found using imaging technology.

The evidence is only a starting point, said Manfred Kitzbichler, an author of the study. "A natural next question we plan to address in future research will be: How do measures of critical dynamics relate to cognitive performance or neuropsychiatric disorders and their treatments?" he said.

More information

The Franklin Institute has more about the human brain  .