Supplements Linked to 23,000 ED Visits Yearly

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Taking Supplements Linked to 23K ED Visits Yearly

Lightly regulated dietary supplements send an estimated 23,005 Americans to the emergency department each year, according to a study published in the October 15 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. 


Younger patients were more likely to suffer heart-related adverse effects from supplements promising weight loss or an energy boost; older patients were more likely to experience problems swallowing after taking a vitamin or mineral pill.


“On the basis of reports from a nationally representative sample of emergency departments from 2004 through 2013, we estimated that dietary supplements were implicated in an average of 23,000 emergency department visits and 2000 hospitalizations annually,” write Andrew I. Geller, MD, from the Division of Healthcare Quality Promotion, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta, Georgia, and coauthors. “Although the numbers of emergency department visits and hospitalizations were less than 5% of the numbers that have been reported for pharmaceutical products previously, dietary supplements are regulated and marketed under the presumption of safety.”


After a change in federal law that took effect October 1994, dietary supplements no longer need approval from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) before they are marketed. Now manufacturers, not the FDA, are responsible for ensuring that supplements are safe before being sold. According to the authors, the number of supplements sold in the United States rose from 4000 in 1994 to more than 55,000 in 2012. About half of adult Americans take at least one dietary supplement per month, spending $14.8 billion on herbal or complementary products in 2007 alone. If the FDA can demonstrate the supplement is unsafe, it can restrict its use: More than 200 dietary supplements were recalled from 2004 through 2012.


N Engl J Med. 2015;373:1531-1540. Abstract

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