Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background and aim Poisoning and deaths linked to methadone have risen since the beginning of methadone treatment.1 2 Methadone poisoning is common among children.3 The aim of this review was to explore methadone toxicity cases in children. Methods A systematic literature review was conducted to examine current knowledge regarding methadone toxicity in children. Methadone poisoning cases in the world were reviewed, as well as the number of methadone-related deaths. The databases searched were EMBASE, MEDLINE and PubMed. All relevant titles, abstracts and full articles were obtained and read. Results 38-eight studies were identified which included a total of 62 children (3 weeks–13 years; median=2 years). Of the 62 cases, 26 cases were reported in the USA, 12 cases in the UK, six in France, five in China, four in Canada, two in Germany, one in Switzerland, one in Italy, one in Austria, one in Portugal, one in Poland, one in Slovakia and one in Malaysia. Twenty-nine children died due to methadone toxicity. Methadone plasma/serum concentrations were measured in 27 cases (22 died and 5 survived). The methadone plasma/serum concentrations in the 22 children who died range from 60 to 1200 µg/l (median: 385 µg/l). The plasma/serum concentrations of methadone in the five children who survived ranged from 30 to 360 µg/l (median: 100 µg/l). The common signs and symptoms were central nervous system depression 92% (n=57), respiratory depression 58% (n=36) and miosis 50% (n=31). It is not possible to be certain as to how many children were deliberately poisoned and how many cases were accidental. It is likely that most of the 11 infants (<12 months old) were poisoned deliberately. In three cases, the methadone was a contaminant in an antibiotic suspension. Conclusion Methadone is a dangerous drug for children, because ingestion of tiny amounts can lead to death. A common cause of accidental poisoning of children is careless storage. Methadone toxicity is characterised by respiratory depression, central nervous system depression and miosis. There are overlaps between toxic and fatal concentrations. Accidental poisoning with methadone can be reduced by the education of patients, supervision of methadone consumption, dispensing of methadone doses in resistant bottles for children and storage of methadone in safe places.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".