Safety issues in the use of children's drugs

With the increase in the variety of children's drugs and the blindness of parents and medical workers towards children's medication, there are more and more problems with the safety of children's medication. Due to children being in an important period of physical growth and development, many organs of the body are not fully developed and mature, so children cannot be treated with medication the same way as adults. Common factors affecting medication safety in children:
3.1 Lack of safety information for pediatric medication
In the clinical trial stage of new drugs for children, children are not among the subjects, and their medication safety information cannot be obtained before the drug is launched. Among the existing drugs on the market, there is also a lack of information on the safety of children's medication. Some drug manuals do not include information on children's safe medication, nor do they provide instructions on the safety of children taking this drug, resulting in unsafe factors in children's medication.
3.2 Insufficient types of specialized drugs for children
In China, there are very few professional manufacturers specializing in the production of children's drugs. Nearly 90% of the drugs circulating on the market do not have children's specific dosage forms, which brings inconvenience to clinical medication for children. Clinicians only rely on experience to administer medication to children, converting adult doses to children, thus posing safety risks to children's medication.
3.3 Other issues with medication for children
1. In China, children's medicine faces a series of problems. One reason is that the dosage is too large, which means that the specifications are not uniform, and there are few small specifications of drugs suitable for children. This not only makes clinical use inconvenient, but also causes significant waste.
Zhang Junli, Director of the Pharmacy Department of the Children's Hospital Affiliated to the Capital Institute of Pediatrics, pointed out that some injections have a specification of 1.0g/dose, but children can only use 0.5g, and the remaining part cannot be used again next time, which is very wasteful. For example, some children's medicines are prescribed to be taken three times a day based on the minimum packaging, which is inconvenient and difficult for parents to accurately classify, and can have a certain impact on the therapeutic effect.
2. Lack of dosage form. There are many forms of medicines for children's common diseases, such as anti infection, expectorants, antipyretics, such as oral solutions, dry suspensions, injections, ointments, sprays, lotions, suppositories, tinctures, etc., but compared with adult medicines, children's pharmaceutical forms are still not rich enough, especially some special drugs. For example, there is no suitable dosage form for treating pediatric heart disease, only tablets suitable for adults. When the dosage for children is 1/7 or 1/8, it will bring difficulties to clinical use.
3. The manual is not detailed. In clinical applications, explanations such as "child reduction" and "safety not yet determined" are often encountered, which brings confusion and safety hazards to clinical applications. For example, the excessive use of some children's medicines.
Standardize drug use, reduce the risk of medication use in children, and minimize the occurrence of adverse drug reactions as much as possible. Strengthen training on medication safety and prevention knowledge for medical staff and children. Timely report any adverse reactions that occur during the medication process, providing reliable data for improving drug instructions and providing reference for clinical safe medication. Utilize existing opportunities to develop specialized dosage forms for children. It is necessary for both medical workers and parents to learn common knowledge about safe medication for children. Safe medication is an issue that everyone should pay attention to. Therefore, we should popularize the safety knowledge of children's medication to every parent and medical worker, prevent them from blindly taking unnecessary drugs on children, and thus improve the safety of children's medication. The shortage of specialized dosage forms for children in the drug market has led to the adult use of medication for children, which is still difficult to solve in the short term. As a temporary supplement to the insufficient specifications of existing drugs, drug dosing has played an undeniable role in making up for it, but there are potential drug safety hazards. Due to the long development cycle and low profits of pediatric drugs, there are currently few types of pediatric specific drugs in China. Therefore, it is recommended that the country formulate relevant policies to encourage pharmaceutical companies to increase the research and development efforts of pediatric specific drugs, in order to reduce the risks that may arise from using adult drugs in different doses