TY - CHAP M1 - Book, Section TI - Chemotherapeutics Overview A1 - Wang, Richard Y. A2 - Hoffman, Robert S. A2 - Howland, Mary Ann A2 - Lewin, Neal A. A2 - Nelson, Lewis S. A2 - Goldfrank, Lewis R. PY - 2015 T2 - Goldfrank's Toxicologic Emergencies, 10e AB - Although overdoses of chemotherapeutics are infrequent, these events are of greater consequence than overdoses of many other xenobiotics because most chemotherapeutics have narrow therapeutic indices. This is evident from survey data from poison centers in the United States. From 1988 to 2010, the median annual number of people exposed to chemotherapeutics reported to US poison centers was about 1000. In the past 5 years, the number of annual exposures to these chemotherapeutics has steadily increased to slightly over 1500 (Chap. 136). These exposures represent about one per 1000 cases of exposures to pharmaceuticals, or one per 2000 cases of all exposures annually reported to US poison centers. Approximately two-thirds of the people exposed to chemotherapeutics in these reports were adults, one-fourth of the group was young children, and the remainder was adolescents. The annual trend for the proportion of exposures among adults and children appears to have remained at approximately 70% and 25%, respectively, from 2001 to 2010. Children and adolescents between the ages of 6 and 19 years accounted for approximately 7% of the population annually exposed, and this frequency did not change between these years. Although these differences among age groups can represent the incidence of cancer in these populations, further analysis is warranted to better define the reasons for these observations because they are not apparent. SN - PB - McGraw-Hill Education CY - New York, NY Y2 - 2024/03/28 UR - accessemergencymedicine.mhmedical.com/content.aspx?aid=1108429632 ER -