A study by US-based researchers, published in the journal PLoS, found that these warning labels often carry information about drug interactions or dosage information.
The study found that consumers, particularly older ones, often overlook prescription drug warning labels in part because the labels fail to attract attention.
Prescription drug warning labels are normally small and colourful in the US. They contain warning statements such as, ‘Do not consume alcohol while taking this medication’ or information about routes of administration such as ‘For external use only’.
Experts in packaging and psychology found that prescription drug warning labels fail to capture patients’ attention, impairing the communication of important safety information.
Methods
Researchers tracked patient’s eye movements as they looked at a drug label and found that in participants over 50 years old, 50% did not notice the warning label. In contrast, 90% of participants between 20 and 29 years old noticed the warning label.
Approximately 15m medication errors happen every year, according to the study, the majority of which happen at home when patients are responsible for managing their own prescriptions.
‘Overhaul’
Warning labels are intended to provide instructions of how to use the medication safely, and the fact that many people ignore them prove that drug labels need an overhaul, researchers said.
“These findings have implications for the design of prescription drug warning labels to improve their effectiveness, particularly as the US government recently started to investigate approaches to standardise the format and content of these labels to decrease medication error rates,” Nora Bello, study author and assistant professor of statistics at Kansas State University, said in a statement.
She added: “Results from this study can provide insight to assist debates about labelling designs that are most likely to impact a wide age range of consumers.”
