Differences between female and male children in the receipt of prescribed psychotropic and controlled-analgesic drugs. A five-year epidemiologic study.

This study describes the differences between male and female children in the receipt of prescriptions for psychotropic and controlled-analgesic drugs in office practice. The study encompassed 341,422 children of ages 0 through 17 years enrolled in the Tennessee Medicaid program during the 5 years 1977-1981. These children made 1,342,573 office visits and received 1,636,127 prescriptions during the study. There were 18,023 (5.3%) children who received prescriptions for psychotropic drugs and 18,744 (5.5%) who received prescriptions for combination products containing psychotropic drugs. There were 26,071 (7.6%) children who were prescribed controlled analgesics and 50,240 (14.7%) who received prescriptions for these substances as fixed combination medications. In this population, proportions of male and female children who received prescriptions for psychotropic and controlled-analgesic drugs were similar through age 11. After age 11, females were increasingly more likely to receive prescriptions for drugs from both categories than were males of the same age. By age 17, the rate of psychotropic drug prescription receipt for female children (6.3%) was nearly twice that for males (3.3%), a ratio consistent with numerous studies in adults. These differences were consistent over diagnostic categories and were only partially explained by differences in office-visit rates. These findings suggest that the known greater rates of psychotropic drug use among adult females are the result of factors whose influence begins at puberty, not before.