Gender and Psychotropic Poisoning in the USA

Abstract

Background: This study focuses on gender-based trends in psychotropic agent poisoning across a 17-year span. The goal of the study was to determine whether there are statistically significant differences in the characteristics of male and female hospital stays for psychotropic agent poisoning.

Methods: We used the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project (HCUP) national database to perform a retrospective cohort study analyzing trends for poisoning by psychotropic agents in males and females between 1997 and 2014.

Results: Between 1997 and 2014, HCUP recorded a total of 1,368,649 psychotropic agent poisoning discharges. The overall number of discharges increased from 62,148 to 82,905 (P < 0.001). The average age at discharge increased from 37.36 to 40.85 years (P < 0.001). As the average length of stay increased from 2.3 to 3.2 days (P < 0.001), hospital charges increased from $6,357 to $27,892 (P < 0.001). Across the study period, the number of in-hospital deaths increased from 468 to 755 (P < 0.001). In each year of the study, both number of discharges and average age were found to be greater for females than for males (P < 0.001).

Conclusions: Female discharges were consistently higher than male discharges, suggesting that female patients were more likely to experience psychotropic poisoning than male patients. This may possibly be due to a greater number of women being prescribed psychotropic medications, in concordance with higher rates of mood and anxiety disorders. Additionally, there exist notable differences in drug metabolism that should be considered to prevent overprescribing.

J Neurol Res. 2020;10(6):220-225
doi: https://doi.org/10.14740/jnr640