According to a study, something weird is going on with melatonin as the number of annual calls to poison control for pediatric melatonin overdoses has risen by 530 percent over the prior 10 years.
In the dark, early days of the coronavirus pandemic, Michael Toce noticed a surprising trend. As a pediatric-emergency-medicine doctor at Boston Children’s Hospital, he was seeing lots of kids who had taken too much medication. The problem wasn’t that they’d overdosed on opioids or painkillers or marijuana. Instead, they’d swallowed too much melatonin, an over-the-counter supplement used as a sleep aid. The ill effects of this mistake seemed mild at the worst—drowsiness, nausea, vomiting—but the number of kids who were affected was going up, up, up.
Other doctors around the country were observing something similar. In 2022, a group in Michigan invited Toce to collaborate on a study of the phenomenon. Their findings, published last June, were striking. Over the prior 10 years, the numbe...