Melatonin: Is It Safe for Kids?

Health headlines can dictate what I write about if they concern nutrition, exercise, or supplements: one article in my newsfeed, and my world gets changed. Such is the case when the CDC published an article in Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report titled Pediatric Melatonin Ingestions—United States, 2012–2021. The resulting health headlines said Melatonin Poisoning Cases Soaring Among U.S. Kids! What???

The report in MMWR was the result of examining calls to the U.S. Poison Control Centers asking about accidental or intentional consumption of melatonin by children from birth to 19 years old. A call to the Poison Control Center is not necessarily to report a poisoning: it’s to ask what to do when your child takes a substance that may be hazardous. In a 10-year period, 260,435 calls were made inquiring about melatonin ingestion. Of that 88% were resolved with no issues. The other 12% went to a medical facility where almost 20,000 were sent home with no issues. About 4,000 were hospitalized and 287 ended up in intensive care; five kids required mechanical ventilation and two died. Those are the numbers in the report.

The issue is that medical records were not consulted to know whether the melatonin was the cause or whether it happened to be taken by someone with a serious medical condition or used as an overdose; remember we’re talking about kids up to 19, not just little ones. Was there a potentially more serious issue behind this report the authors should have focused on? I’ll talk about it on Saturday.

I don’t want to be guilty of trying to scare you, so I’ll tell you this: our grandson Riley has been taking melatonin for kids at bedtime for a couple years. Without it he takes an hour or more to fall asleep, and he needs that hour. And we’ve been obsessive with teaching him the difference between gummy candy and gummy vitamins, so we aren’t worried about it at all.

What are you prepared to do today?

        Dr. Chet

Reference: MMWR Weekly / June 3, 2022 / 71(22);725–729.