Something Weird Is Going On With Melatonin

[Celerity]

Pediatric overdoses have increased by 530 percent over the past decade.

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2023/05/melatonin-kids-overdose/674104/

https://archive.is/1BtqT



In the dark, early days of the coronavirus pandemic, Michael Toce noticed a surprising trend. As a pediatric-emergency-medicine doctor at Boston Children’s Hospital, he was seeing lots of kids who had taken too much medication. The problem wasn’t that they’d overdosed on opioids or painkillers or marijuana. Instead, they’d swallowed too much melatonin, an over-the-counter supplement used as a sleep aid. The ill effects of this mistake seemed mild at the worst—drowsiness, nausea, vomiting—but the number of kids who were affected was going up, up, up.

Other doctors around the country were observing something similar. In 2022, a group in Michigan invited Toce to collaborate on a study of the phenomenon. Their findings, published last June, were striking. Over the prior 10 years, the number of annual calls to poison control for pediatric melatonin overdoses had risen by 530 percent. By 2020, poison control was receiving more calls about pediatric overdoses on melatonin than on any other substance. Just last month, in a broader study based on emergency-room data over a similar period, researchers at the CDC reported a 420 percent increase in visits for pediatric melatonin ingestions. Meanwhile, the overdose numbers for other substances plummeted during the 2010s: Tylenol, down 53 percent; opioids, down 54 percent; many cough and cold medications, down 72 percent. The question is: What sets melatonin apart?

The most obvious answer is its recent surge in popularity. From 2009 to 2018, American melatonin use increased fivefold, and from 2016 to 2020, U.S. sales of the supplement rose from $285 million to $821 million. A pandemic-era surge in diagnosed sleep disorders may have only accelerated this growing popularity. The year before melatonin usage began to rise, the CDC launched an initiative to reduce pediatric overdoses as a whole. It promoted the widespread adoption of flow restrictors and child-resistant packaging, and ran campaigns to educate parents about medication safety and storage. It’s possible that melatonin overdoses are rarer now than they would have been without the CDC’s safety initiative, but are still increasing on account of the supplement’s overall success in the marketplace.

Those changes in demand are “definitely a factor” in the associated surge in overdoses, says Pieter Cohen, a doctor and supplements expert at Cambridge Health Alliance, in Somerville, Massachusetts. Whether they account for all of the surge or most of it or merely some of it remains a mystery. Several other factors would also seem to be involved, Cohen told me. For starters, many melatonin supplements come in an appetizing gummy form. So do all sorts of vitamins and minerals for kids—vitamin A, vitamin C, calcium, zinc—but melatonin is not a vitamin or a mineral. It’s an active hormone, and the body has not developed great mechanisms for coping with its intake in excess, Cohen said.

snip

[SharonAnn]

1. Trying to get kids to go to sleep? Pills look like candy? Huh?

[haele]

8. Too many kids supplemental are gummies.

Vitamins and other supplements - Growing Pains, Anti-anxiety, Tummy Soothers and other kid specific supplements are on the increase; especially Hormone supplements are on the rise for adults, those can also be a bottom line dollar consideration with these supplement companies who aren't known for rigorous research and quality control.
I have to be extremely careful with kid's supplements. Too many of them are just a low dosage of adult supplements labeled for kids without actual tests for safety when it comes to toddlers or pre-teens.
And parents without a biochemistry background don't typically think to even Google what might be a safe dosage of a regulated supplement component, let alone the unregulated supplements typically found OTC; it's easy to OD a child.
And a toddler, of course, just thinks of it as candy. I still have to keep Ricola cough drops hidden from the 7 year old; she's greedy for sweets, and has been caught red-handed sneaking them when she gets a jones for sweets or snacking.

Haele

[GopherGal]

9. I immediately started scanning for the word "gummies"

and was surprised it wasn't mentioned until the fourth paragraph.

I've been the recipient of enough ads for melatonin gummies/CDB gummies that I've thought many times "that's going to be irresistibly appealing to young kids". If visually appealing detergent pods create an ingestion hazard, it's certainly foreseeable that medications that look like kids' vitamins/candy are going to be ingested by some children.

[Sky Jewels]

12. We buy chewable melatonin that has a pleasant orange flavor.

I can see the appeal to kids. (There are just two adults left in our household now.)

[milestogo]

2. Thought this was another name for Mrs Trump

[txwhitedove]

3. Me too! Ha. But seriously, I didn't give my kids anything for sleep, except a song and

a story after bath. It was a happy relaxing time.

[Hassin Bin Sober]

5. Yep!

[niyad]

6. My first thought, as well.

[Quakerfriend]

4. I hope parents aren't using melatonin to get

their kids to bed early. Not many kids have
trouble sleeping.

As an aside- I have noticed something odd. When I take melatonin the next day @ 2 pm I become like Rumplestiltskin & must find a bed immediately to take a snooze.

This happen even when I take the smallest dose (1.5mg) & I am not a napper.

[niyad]

7. This is so bizarre. Thank you for bringing it to us. Geez, haven"t these people

heard of chamomile?

For a young friend who suffered from night terrors, I had a tea made up of chamomile, mint, and eucalyptus, given half an hour before bedtime. Worked quite well.

[calguy]

10. Ha! I clicked on this post thinking it was going to be about Melania

[IcyPeas]

11. When i was a kid it was warm milk.

[TheBlackAdder]

13. Melatonin supplements affect the natural use it or lose it abilities and slowly lose effectiveness.

.

There are natural ways to rebuild melatonin production in most people.

Taking supplements periodically is OK, but reliance on them affects the natural production abilities.

.

[liberal_mama]

14. Everyone seems to love melatonin, but when I've taken it, it felt very strange, like sleep paralysis

I have trouble sleeping so I've tried it in various doses and I've fallen asleep, but it was a weird sleep, like there was a weight on top of me.

My younger son loves it. He takes it all the time. He's 29. I never gave my kids any medication or anything to make them sleep when they were little.

[ananda]

15. Young people should not need melatonin.

I've been taking a very small does at night for a little
over a year, but I'm very old and need it.

It's changed the way I dream, but no big deal, and it
really does help me sleep.

[Hotler]

16. Parents drugging their kids to get them out of their hair in the evening?

A 1/4 of a Halcion worked for me. There a small pill and the Doctor said to cut them in to 1/4ths. Once you take it you want to be near a bed in about 5-minutes.