Consult with your family doctor
Last year, the Council for Responsible Nutrition, a leading supplement industry group, published voluntary guidelines for its members. Among them: put products in child deterrent packaging; tell people to consult a pediatrician before using melatonin; and warn caregivers that melatonin is “for occasional and/or intermittent use only.”
Plenty of manufacturers aren’t part of CRN, and it’s not hard to find suppliers that aren’t in compliance with those recommendations. And whether parents follow the recommendations is something else entirely. User reviews and academic surveys indicate that some parents are dosing regularly for months or years on end, and the products themselves seem packaged for long-term use: For example, the company MaryRuth’s sells bottles of children’s melatonin gummies labeled “2 month supply.” Natrol, a popular brand that warns caregivers that the product is “for occasional short-term use only,” sells bottles containing 140 doses. (MaryRuth’s did not respond to requests for comment, and a spokesperson for Natrol declined to comment.)
Meanwhile, as melatonin sales climb, a growing body of evidence points to cases of misuse.
One issue: Children seem to be sometimes finding, and swallowing, gummies and other melatonin products. Calls to poison control centers for pediatric melatonin ingestion increased 530 percent between 2012 and 2021, according to one analysis published by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Mostly, nothing happened: Among small children, the large majority of the incidents were resolved without the child experiencing symptoms at all. When symptoms do appear, they tend to be mild—drowsiness, for example, or gastrointestinal upset. (Achieving a lethal dose of melatonin appears to be virtually impossible, said Laura Labay, a forensic toxicologist at NMS Labs, which provides toxicology testing services.)
Still, some experts have expressed concern that melatonin misuse might, in rare cases, contribute to more serious outcomes.
In 2015, Sandra Bishop-Freeman, now the chief toxicologist at the North Carolina Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, was called to review on a tragic case. A 3-month-old girl had died in her crib. More than 20 bottles of melatonin were found in the home, and an investigation showed that the girl and her twin sister had been given 5 milligram doses of melatonin multiple times per day to help them sleep. The infant’s blood levels of melatonin were orders of magnitude above the natural range.
Source link
