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While medication-related fatalities in clinical settings have long captured the attention of researchers and health authorities, skyrocketing rates of deaths at home from combining medications and other substances have gone largely unnoticed, ScienceDaily reported July 29.

Researchers at the University of California, San Diego examined records on 200,000 U.S. deaths from medication errors from 1983 to 2004 and found that the highest rate of increase in these deaths -- a staggering 3,196 percent -- was for deaths at home from combining prescription drugs with alcohol and/or street drugs. This issue received national attention in January after the accidental prescription overdose death of actor Heath Ledger at age 28.

By contrast with the numbers for these domestic deaths, fatal medication errors in clinical settings such as hospitals where alcohol or street drugs were not involved showed the smallest rate of increase among the types of deaths studied: 5 percent.

"The decades-long shift in the location of medication consumption from clinical to domestic settings is linked to a dramatic increase in fatal medication errors," the researchers state in their study.

Besides calling for possible changes in policy and clinical practice as a result of the trend, the researchers believe research on medication errors needs an expanded scope to focus on domestic settings and younger patients in addition to clinical settings and elderly populations.

The research, supported in part by a grant from the Marian E. Smith Foundation, is published in the July 28 issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine.