The study, conducted by the federal government, is the first to document the extent of injuries and hospitalizations linked to the use of dietary supplements and energy enhancers.
The dietary supplement industry has been growing by leaps and bounds, and recent figures show its worth at over $32 billion a year. With its rapid growth has come increased scrutiny, including calls for tougher regulations. Recently, sexual enhancement pills were recalled because of undeclared new drugs not approved by the FDA.
In September, the New York attorney general’s office opened an investigation into an herb sold as Devil’s Claw, and earlier this year, the FDA launched a safety review into green coffee bean extracts. after labels on some of the extracts claimed they were prepared in FDA-approved laboratories.
The study came out Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine and was conducted by health authorities in the FDA and researchers at the CDC. Emergency room visits at 63 hospitals around the country were tracked over a 10-year period from 2004 to 2013. Those visits linked to the use of dietary supplements were analysed in the study.
Researchers found that of the 23,000 emergency room visits involving diet pills, energy enhancers or vitamins, many involved children mistakenly taking a supplement thinking it was a vitamin or older adults choking on a big pill. Many more visits involved teenagers taking energy enhancers to stay awake or lose weight.
“More than one-quarter (28 percent) of emergency department visits for supplement-related adverse events in our study involved young adults between the ages of 20 and 34 years. Such visits commonly involve cardiovascular manifestations from weight-loss or energy products among young adults,” says the report.
Prescription drugs are responsible for 30 times as many trips to the emergency room every year. A study conducted in 2006 found that the majority of these visits involved older adults. It was found that ER visits caused by supplements involved young adults, whereas prescription drugs were found to be responsible for older adult visits.
Over one-fourth of the ER visits involved young adults between the age of 20 to 34, and half of the cases involved weight loss or energy enhancement pills. The products used typically contained a variety of herbs and extracts and are advertised on the Internet, magazines and television. They included products like Hydroxycut, Xenadrine, Raspberry Ketones and Black Jack Energy, the researchers said.
Because these products are not regulated by the FDA, there is no way to know for sure just how safe they may be. These products often contain hazardous chemicals. While some weight loss products, such as prescription amphetamines and Adderall must contain a warning about potentially adverse effects on the cardiovascular system, over-the-counter supplements for weight loss do not have to carry that warning.
Interestingly, under a 1994 federal law that has caused a lot of criticism, supplements are considered safe “until proven otherwise.” Supplements do not have to be approved by the FDA, nor do they have to list any adverse effects or warnings on the label.
According to the New York Times, Dr. Pieter Cohen, an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School who was not involved in the new research said, “This is very disheartening. What we’re seeing from this study is that the system has failed. It’s failing to protect consumers from very serious harms.”
Duffy Mackay, a spokesman for the Council for Responsible Nutrition, a supplement industry trade group, says the study actually highlights just how safe supplements really are. “We have over 150 million Americans taking these products each year,” he said. “This suggests that far less than one-tenth of one percent of supplement users will visit the emergency room.”
