Increasing burden of pill identification requests to US Poison Centers

Information calls to poison centers, particularly for pill identification (PID), have been increasing.

Retrospective review of information calls reported to U.S. poison centers for 2002-2007.

Total number of information calls increased by 44%, while calls related to human exposures increased by 4.3%. The subcategory "pill identification" was exclusively responsible for the increase in information calls with an increase of greater than 90%. Over the 6 years, PID requests from the public, police, and healthcare facility changed by +110, +144, and -24%, respectively. PID requests from the public, police, and healthcare facility were 78, 12 and 10%, respectively. Other information calls showed a decrease or no change: calls for poison information (-17%), medical information (-2.5%), and drug information (non-PID) (+1%). Twenty-five percent of all calls to U.S. poison centers are now to identify a pill unrelated to an exposure. Sixty-four percent of all identified pills were drugs with abuse potential.

Drugs with abuse potential are less than 4% of pharmaceutical sales, yet greater than 60% of all PID requests involved drugs with abuse potential. This suggests that PID is strongly driven by interest in drugs with abuse potential.

PID calls are increasing dramatically and taxing limited poison center resources. The majority requests for identification of an unknown pill involved drugs with abuse potential.