ER doctors treating kids with acute vomiting can send them home with fewer meds: Study
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The study has found that most children may only require two or fewer doses of ondansetron after they're discharged from the emergency department for being treated for acute gastroenteritis.
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Previously, there was no standard to measure the dosage prescribed to a child after they were discharged from the hospital, according to Dr. Stephen Freedman, professor at the Cumming School of Medicine and lead researcher of the study.
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Early studies on the medication found that it worked well to treat acute vomiting in children who visited the emergency department and reduced the necessity for intravenous hydration and hospitalizations.
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'What we then saw starting to happen is that many physicians were starting to send children home with the medication,' he said, with dosage sometimes in the dozens, despite studies having only explored the impact of one dose of the medication.
Overdosage of the medication can increase diarrhoea symptoms in children, the potential severity of which can overtake the benefit of no longer feeling the need to vomit.
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Although the study was published on Wednesday, recruitment for the trial took place between September 2019 to November 2024, delayed due to the challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic.
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The study examined the impact of the medication in 1,030 children across six pediatric emergency departments. Caregivers of the children were given six doses of the medication to take home and use as needed, according to Freedman.
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All children had already been given one dose of the medication during their visit to the emergency department, he added.
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'We didn't instruct caregivers to routinely given it because most children don't have any more vomiting or nausea after they go home anyways,' Freedman said. 'So we left the number of doses to be administered at the discretion of the caregivers and their children.'
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