Experts warn there’s no medical evidence they are safe in children

The number of babies and toddlers being prescribed antipsychotic drugs has soared in just one year in the US, experts have warned.

Almost 20,000 prescriptions for the medication were written for children younger than two in 2014.

It marks a steep rise from the previous year when 13,000 prescriptions for the drugs were made out – a jump of 50 per cent in the 12-month period, the New York Times reported.

Furthermore, prescriptions for the antidepressant fluoxetine, which is marketed as Prozac, increased by 23 per cent for children under two, according to the data compiled by IMS Health.

Experts warn the rise comes in spite of no published research investigating the effectiveness and potential health risks of these drugs in young children.

The medication were designed for use in adults, not babies, they said.

The data, compiled for The Times, did not specify address what medical conditions the prescriptions were for.

Doctors are ‘generally’ allowed to prescribe drugs for whatever purpose they feel is appropriate, so the drugs could potentially be used in different ways.

Some of the 20,000 prescriptions were written for risperidone, a drug commonly used to treat the symptoms of schizophrenic in adults and teenagers 13 years of age and older, according to the National Institutes of Health.

Risperidone is also used to treat behavior problems – including aggression, self-injury and mood changes – in children over the age of 5 who have autism, the NIH said.

Another antipsychotic prescribed for children under the age of two is quetiapine, which the NIH said is used to treat schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.

However, in interviews with the Times, child psychiatry and neurology experts said they had not heard of these medications being prescribed to children under the age of three.

Dr Mary Margaret Gleason, a pediatrician and child psychiatrist at Tulane University School of Medicine, said: ‘People are doing their very best with the tools available to them.

‘There’s a sense of desperation with families of children who are suffering, and the tool that most providers have is the prescription pad.’

Dr Gleason also said that children so young have brains that are rapidly developing.
As such, giving them these drugs – particularly because there have not been any studies on their effectiveness – is risky.

‘There are not studies, and I’m not pushing for them,’ she added.

Dr Martin Drell, the former president of the American Academy of Child and Psychiatry, told the Times that he did not know what rationale other doctors used to prescribe these drugs in children.

‘For the protection of kids, we should evaluate this,’ Dr Drell said.

One study, published earlier this year and funded by the National Institutes of Health, focused on older children.

It found boys are more likely to be prescribed antipsychotic medication than girls the same age.

Around 1.5 per cent of boys aged 10 to 18 were given the drugs in 2010, though the rate falls dramatically after the age of 19.

Co-author of the study, Dr Michael Schoenbaum, senior advisor for mental health services, epidemiology and economics at the NIH, said: ‘What’s especially important is the finding that around 1.5 percent of boys aged 10-18 are on antipsychotics, and then this rate abruptly falls by half, as adolescents become young adults.

‘Antipsychotics should be prescribed with care. They can adversely affect both physical and neurological function and some of their adverse effects can persist even after the medication is stopped.’

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved antipsychotics for children with certain disorders, particularly bipolar disorder, psychosis/schizophrenia, and autism.

However, the research team found that the medication use patterns do not match the illness patterns. The mismatch means that many antipsychotic prescriptions for young people may be for off-label purposes, that is, for uses not approved by FDA.

Written by Lisa Ryan and published by The Daily Mail, December 15, 2015.

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