John
08-20-2009, 11:49 PM
A report (http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/161334.php) published in the New England Journal of Medicine, warns that the use of codeine to treat pain following a tonsillectomy could prove fatal for some children.
Enlarged tonsils are usually treated with antibiotics, but tonsillectomy may be performed if a child has sleep apnoea, where breathing stops during sleep.
In one such case, the mother of a young child, who had had the operation as an outpatient, was given a syrup containing codeine and told to give this to the child for pain relief. Although the mother followed the instructions carefully, the child developed a fever and wheezing on the second night, and was found dead the following morning with high levels of morphine in his body.
It transpired that the child had a genetic anomaly which made him an ultra-rapid metabolizer of codeine, resulting in the production of significantly higher amounts of morphine. The gene responsible for this anomaly is present in just over one per-cent of Caucasians and as many as 30% of people of African origin.
Mothers who carry this gene can also pass on toxic levels of morphine to their babies via their breast milk if they take even small doses of codeine following childbirth. Read more... (http://children.webmd.com/news/20070817/codeine-warning-for-breastfeeding-moms?src)
Enlarged tonsils are usually treated with antibiotics, but tonsillectomy may be performed if a child has sleep apnoea, where breathing stops during sleep.
In one such case, the mother of a young child, who had had the operation as an outpatient, was given a syrup containing codeine and told to give this to the child for pain relief. Although the mother followed the instructions carefully, the child developed a fever and wheezing on the second night, and was found dead the following morning with high levels of morphine in his body.
It transpired that the child had a genetic anomaly which made him an ultra-rapid metabolizer of codeine, resulting in the production of significantly higher amounts of morphine. The gene responsible for this anomaly is present in just over one per-cent of Caucasians and as many as 30% of people of African origin.
Mothers who carry this gene can also pass on toxic levels of morphine to their babies via their breast milk if they take even small doses of codeine following childbirth. Read more... (http://children.webmd.com/news/20070817/codeine-warning-for-breastfeeding-moms?src)