How much attention do you pay to the labels on a prescription bottle? Do you read the warnings, the directions and suggested dosages before them? Or do you just take a few pills and drop them down the hatch? New research shows many people, especially those over 50, don’t read the bottles. This oversight has led to numerous medicals problem.
The lack of information
About 15 million medication errors occur each year in the United States, and most happen at home where patients are responsible for complying with medication regimes, according to the Kansas State study.
“These findings have implications for the design of prescription drug warning labels to improve their effectiveness, particularly as the U.S. government recently started to investigate approaches to standardize the format and content of these labels to decrease medication error rates,” Nora Bello, an assistant professor of statistics at Kansas State University said. “Results from this study can provide insight to assist debates about labeling designs that are most likely to impact a wide age range of consumers.”
Stats show need for new labels
In the study, which is published in PLoS ONE, 50 percent of participants older than 50 years of age failed to notice a warning label on prescription vials. For 22 percent of these participants, their vision did not enter the warning label area in any of the five vials they interacted with. In contrast, 90 percent of young adults between ages 20 and 29 fixated on the warning labels.
Capturing attention
The labels need to draw in the user’s attention, need to be in an area that can be seen, and in big enough print to be read. The research sheds new light on improvements that could be made to avoid some of the medical errors that occur each in the United States.
