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Every eight minutes, a child in the United States is affected by a medication error on the part of their parents or caregivers, according to a new study.

In the study, researchers found that 63,000 children younger than age 6 were affected yearly by out-of-hospital medication errors between 2002 and 2012, and most of those mistakes occurred at the children’s homes.

“Some of these errors have very serious consequences,” said study author Dr. Huiyun Xiang, the director of the Center for Pediatric Trauma Research at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio. During the study, 25 children died from medication errors, and 4,658 had to be hospitalized.

The researchers also found that the number of errors involving the use of cough and cold medications decreased by 59 percent between 2002 and 2012, but the number of errors related to the use of all other medications increased by almost 43 percent.

In 2007, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration began recommending against the use of cough and cold medicines in children under 6 because there was no […]