Severe cardiac adverse effects are often related to intravenous phenytoin overdose. However, there is no reported cardiotoxicity resulting from oral overdose of phenytoin. We report a patient with post-traumatic epilepsy who received oral phenytoin for five months and developed life-threatening junctional bradycardia, with his serum phenytoin level reaching up to 91 microg/mL. The patient was s...

Tricyclic antidepressant (TCA) overdose is a relatively common cause of poisoning. According to the American Association of Poison Control Centers, 7961 patients with amitriptyline poisoning were reported in 2000. Of these, 958 were under 6 years old, 6388 needed treatment in a health care facility and 68 patients died [1]. The current therapy of TCA overdose includes preventive measures such a...

BACKGROUND AND AIMS It has been suggested that distributing naloxone to people who inject drugs (PWID) will lead to fewer attendances by emergency medical services at opioid-related overdose incidents if peer administration of naloxone was perceived to have resuscitated the overdose victim successfully. This study evaluated the impact of a national naloxone programme (NNP) on ambulance attendan...

BACKGROUND Opioid (including prescription opiate) abuse and overdose rates in the United States have surged in the past decade. The dearth and limitations of opioid abuse and overdose surveillance systems impede the development of interventions to address this epidemic. Objective. We explored evidence to support the validity of emergency medical services (EMS) data on naloxone administration as...

BACKGROUND To determine the existence of a social gradient in fatal overdose cases related to non-prescribed opioids and cocaine use, recorded in Luxembourg between 1994 and 2011. METHODS Overdose cases were individually matched with four controls in a nested case-control study design, according to sex, year of birth, drug administration route and duration of drug use. The study sample, compo...

OBJECTIVE To describe the strategies and policies implemented in Ohio to improve opioid safety and to discuss the role that pharmacists can play in implementing, promoting, and enhancing the effectiveness of these policies. SETTING Ohio has the fifth highest rate of drug overdose deaths (24.6 deaths per 100,000) in the United States. Unintentional drug overdose has become the leading cause of...

The opioid overdose epidemic is an alarming and serious public health problem in the United States (US) that has been escalating for 11 years. The 2011 National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH) demonstrated that 1 in 20 persons in the US aged 12 or older reported nonmedical use of prescription painkillers in the past year. Prescription drug overdose is now the leading cause of accidental d...

Two very different cases of overdose with tranylcypromine are presented. One clinical case involving the ingestion of 400 mg tranylcypromine with suicidal intention and one fatality with a suspicion of possible tranylcypromine overdose were examined. Both cases showed similar blood concentrations (0.5 and 0.7 mg/L, respectively), but the clinical case exhibited only mild symptoms of intoxicatio...

Fatal opioid overdose, the leading cause of injury death in the USA, is regularly described as an epidemic. The response to the overdose crisis, however, has largely failed to utilise many of the public health tools that have proven effective in combating epidemics. Chief among these is the systematic and timely use of data by public health officials to track outbreaks and effectively target in...

COVID-19 is compounding opioid use disorder throughout the United States. While recent commentaries provide useful policy recommendations, few studies examine intersection of responses and patterns overdose. We overdoses prior to following Pennsylvania stay-at-home order implemented on April 1, 2020. Using data from Overdose Information Network, we measure change in monthly incidents opioid-rel...