The first is the long wave of the Covid pandemic which not only affects young people confined at home for long periods without school and social connections, but also the risky impact of dangerous new addictions such as those on the internet and social media. The surge in psychotropic drugs among children and adolescents can also be explained by two major phenomena of our time: consumption in the age group between zero and seventeen years has almost tripled in less than ten years, increasing from 20.6 packs per 1000 children in 2016 to 59.3 packs in 2024, while the incidence has more than doubled (from 0.26% to 0.57%, in practice one minors every 175 children). The numbers skyrocketed, reaching a peak in the 12 to 17 year age group with consumption of 129.1 packs per thousand children with an incidence of 1.17%, in practice more than one in a hundred teenagers continues to use psychotropic drugs. With drugs used to treat attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), there was a marked improvement (+25% in just one year). With these numbers, Italy is still far from other countries – such as the United States where almost one in four teenagers uses psychotropic drugs – but the growth trend is now very clear.
Data on this worrying growth are contained in the latest OsMed 2024 Report on drug use in Italy, just published by the Italian Medicines Agency (Aifa). “This increase does not surprise us, because it is in line with the increase in the prevalence of mental disorders in very young age groups that we detected in recent years,” explained the Italian Society of Psychiatry yesterday. The growth in the use of psychotropic drugs, the consumption of which increased by 8.6% in the last year, also marks the entry of this type of drug into the group of drugs most commonly used by the under 18 age group. Last year, according to Aifa data, around 4.6 million children and adolescents aged between zero and 17 years in Italy received at least one drug prescription (there will be 4.4 million in 2023): almost half of the child population. But if we consider all the packages sold to children – more than 20 million – that’s more than 2 drugs each. And among the 30 most widely used drugs – of which drugs for respiratory infections include antibiotics – there are also six drugs related to the central nervous system. Among the mental health medications most commonly prescribed to minors, chief among them are antipsychotics, antidepressants, and medications for ADHD (attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder) whose number of prescriptions increased by 24.9 percent in just one year. “Given that the majority of prescriptions for psychotropic drugs are concentrated in the age group 12-17 years, the percentage distribution of consumption between different subcategories highlights that the prescription of antipsychotics is high in all age groups, while that of ADHD drugs in the age group 6-11 years”, underlines the report of the Italian Medicines Agency.
In general, according to AIFA figures, pharmaceutical spending last year continued to increase, registering an increase of +2.8% compared to the previous year, reaching 37.2 billion euros, three quarters of which were paid by public services, while the expenditure incurred by the public to purchase medicines amounted to 10.2 billion, with a slight decrease (-4.6%),: 1.6 billion was used for the purchase of reimbursable class A medicines but purchased privately; 7 for class C drugs is paid entirely by residents. Citizens are also responsible for around $440 million in prescription payments and $1 billion in branded medicine purchases, compared with the equivalent amount paid by the NHS. The figures have increased slightly: in 2024, they represent 23.5% of spending and 31.6% of consumption. Despite this, Italy ranks third last in Europe in terms of generic drug consumption.
In terms of overall consumption, anti-cancer drugs remain at the top of the shopping list, with Italians continuing to use too many antibiotics, while there has been a boom in anti-obesity drugs, which have entered the top 10 most widely consumed prescription drugs.
