Opioids are sending more and more American kids to the hospital

Even 5-year-olds are feeling the effects of the United States opioid epidemic.

The number of children hospitalized for opioid-related injuries has been steadily growing, as have the severity of the symptoms — the number of pediatric intensive care unit visits doubled between 2004 and 2015, a study published Monday found. Though the majority of hospitalizations were for kids between the ages of 12 and 17, children under the age of 6 accounted for a third of the hospitalizations.

The study results mirror the research on opioid-related hospitalizations among American adults, which have skyrocketed in recent years. And they're intricately linked: about 20 percent of the children who were younger than 6 when they were hospitalized needed care after ingesting methadone, a drug that’s used to treat opioid addiction — suggesting that kids were accidentally taking their parents’ medication.

“These kids are really the secondary victims of this adult opioid epidemic,” Jason Kane, the study’s lead author and an associate pediatrics professor at the University of Chicago, told the Associated Press.

It’s unclear why opioids are sending so many kids to the hospital, though Kane said it’s likely due to the fact that opioids have become both more potent and more easily available in recent years. The study looked at hospitalizations resulting from kids taking opioids both accidentally and on purpose.

More than 42,000 people are believed to have died from opioid overdoses in 2016.

Opioids are still responsible for just a fraction of 4.2 million hospitalizations that took place over the course of the study, which examined information from 31 children’s hospitals across the country, and the number of children who died from opioids actually decreased between 2004 and 2015. But opioids are still incredibly dangerous for children: 43 percent of the opioid-related hospitalizations included stays in hospitals’ intensive care units, and 37 percent of the children who ended up in those units had to be hooked up to ventilators in order to survive.

In an editorial published alongside the study, Sheryl Ryan, the chief of the adolescent medicine division for Penn State’s Health Milton S. Hershey Medical Center, said the findings emphasized the need for programs that steer kids away from opioids.

“Several highly effective, evidence-based programs have been shown to reduce the use and abuse of alcohol and other drugs, including opioids, by adolescents and young adults,” Ryan wrote. But this study, she wrote, “[highlights] the need for pediatricians to engage in this critical work to combat the ongoing opioid crisis in our country.”