More pills to children and in 10 years psychotropic drugs have almost tripled

First and foremost, there is the long wave of the Covid pandemic that has hit the very young locked up in homes for long periods without school and social relations, but also the risky effects of new insidious addictions such as those from the Internet and social media. These two major phenomena of our time could also explain the boom in psychotropic drugs among children and young people: consumption in the zero to seventeen age group has practically tripled in less than ten years, rising from 20.6 packages per 1,000 children in 2016 to 59.3 packages in 2024, while the incidence has more than doubled (from 0.26% to 0.57%, or one child for every 175). Numbers that skyrocket, reaching their peak in the 12-17 age group, where a consumption of 129.1 packs per thousand children is recorded, with an incidence of 1.17%, i.e. more than one teenager in a hundred uses psychotropic drugs continuously. With the drugs used to treat the so-called attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (Adhd) recording a real boom (+25% in just one year). With these numbers, Italy is still a long way from other countries - such as the USA, where psychotropic drugs are used by almost one in four adolescents - but the growth trend now seems very clear.

The data on this worrying growth are contained in the latest OsMed 2024 Report on the use of medicines in Italy, just published by the Italian Medicines Agency (Aifa). 'This increase does not surprise us, because it parallels the increase in the prevalence of mental disorders in the very young that we are detecting in recent years,' the Italian Society of Psychiatry explained yesterday. The growth in the use of psychotropic drugs, the consumption of which has increased by 8.6% in the past year, has also marked the entry of this type of medication among those most used by the under-18s. Last year, according to Aifa data, about 4.6 million children and adolescents between the ages of zero and 17 in Italy received at least one pharmaceutical prescription (there were 4.4 million in 2023): practically half of the paediatric population. But if we take into account all the packages sold to children - more than 20 million - that's more than 2 drugs per head. And among the top 30 most used medicines - where those for respiratory infections including antibiotics predominate - there are also six that affect the central nervous system. Among the most prescribed mental health drugs for minors are mainly antipsychotics, antidepressants and drugs for Adhd (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder), which saw prescriptions increase by 24.9 per cent in just one year. 'Taking into account that most prescriptions of psychotropic drugs are concentrated in the 12-17 age group, the percentage distribution of consumption among the different subcategories shows that the prescription of antipsychotics is high in all age groups, while that of ADHD drugs in the 6-11 age group,' the Italian Medicines Agency report further emphasises.

In general, according to AIFA's figures, last year pharmaceutical expenditure continued to rise, registering a 2.8% increase over the previous year, reaching 37.2 billion euro, three quarters of which was paid for by the public service, while the expenditure incurred by citizens to buy medicines amounted to 10.2 billion, with a slight drop (-4.6%): 1.6 billion euro went on the purchase of reimbursable band A medicines purchased privately; 7 billion euro on band C medicines paid for in full by citizens. Also borne by citizens are about 440 million for the prescription charge and 1 billion to buy branded drugs instead of the equivalents reimbursed by the SSN, which are growing slightly: in 2024 they accounted for 23.5% of expenditure and 31.6% of consumption. Despite this, Italy ranks third last in Europe for generic consumption.

In terms of overall consumption, anti-cancer drugs remain at the top of the spending charts, with Italians continuing to use too many antibiotics, while there has been a boom in anti-obesity drugs, which have entered the top 10 of prescription medicines on which citizens spend the most.