Drug Misuse in Adolescents Presenting to the Emergency Department
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVES: Drug misuse is a disturbing, common practice among youth. One in 4 American adolescents reports consuming prescription medications without a clinical indication. We sought to explore current trends of drug misuse in adolescents. METHODS: Using the 37 participating sites of the ToxIC (Toxicology Investigators Consortium) Case Registry, a cross-country surveillance tool, we conducted an observational cohort study of all adolescents (aged 13-18 years) who presented to emergency departments with drug misuse and required a bedside medical toxicology consultation between January 2010 and June 2013. RESULTS: Of 3043 poisonings, 202 (7%) involved drug misuse (139 [69%] were males). Illicit drugs (primarily synthetic cannabinoids and "bath salts") were encountered in 101 (50%), followed by prescription medications (56 [28%]) and over-the-counter (OTC) drugs (51 [25%]). Dextromethorphan was the most commonly misused legal medication (24 [12%]). Polypharmacy exposure was documented in 74 (37%). One hundred sixty-three adolescents (81%) were symptomatic; of these, 81% had central nervous system impairments: psychosis (38%), agitation (30%), coma (26%), myoclonus (11%), and seizures (10%); and 66 (41%) displayed a specific toxidrome, most commonly sedative-hypnotic. Benzodiazepines were the most frequently administered medications (46%). Antidotes were administered to 28% of adolescents, primarily naloxone, physostigmine, N-acetyl-cysteine, and flumazenil. No deaths were recorded. CONCLUSIONS: Adolescents presenting with drug misuse may be exposed to a wide range and combinations of therapeutics or illicit substances and frequently display central nervous system abnormalities, compromising the ability to obtain a reliable history. Frontline clinicians should maintain a high index of suspicion, as routine toxicology screenings fail to detect most contemporary misused legal and designer drugs.
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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 | 0.001 |
| 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".