Arizona medical malpractice attorneys are always especially concerned about child patient safety because of the vulnerability of these young patients. A new study shows that many hospitalized children receive far too many medications, even when there are safety concerns about these drugs.

Researchers analyzed data involving more than 580,000 pediatric patients from 450 hospitals. The researchers found that a large number of children in the hospital received at least five or more drugs during each day they were in the hospital. In some cases, children received as many as 13 different drugs throughout their hospitalization. In a few cases, children who had been in the hospital for about a week received about 35 different drugs. The rarer the condition, the more drugs the child received.

Some of the most common medications administered to children in the hospital were antibiotics, acetaminophen and albuterol. What is even more concerning to Arizona medical malpractice lawyers is that many of these drugs were prescribed to these children for off-label purposes. That means that the drugs were not approved for the purposes for which they were administered.

Doctors are not prevented from prescribing drugs for purposes for which they have not been approved by the Food and Drug Administration. However, the use of drugs for off-label purposes can be always dangerous, because the FDA has not determined the side effects and complications arising from the use of these medications to treat an unapproved illness.

There were other intriguing findings from the analysis. Researchers found that children's hospitals were likely to give children more drugs than general hospitals. Children aged one and above were also more likely to receive multiple drugs than infants.