The Chicago police department is investigating whether recent insulin overdoses in patients treated at University of Chicago Hospitals were intentional.
According to the Chicago Tribune yesterday, the police were called by the University of Chicago Hospitals Medical Center to help them investigate unexplained and overwhelming increases in insulin that may have killed one female patient and put another in a coma.
Hospital officials became concerned after they found that the patient in a coma had insulin levels that were hundreds of times too high in her bloodstream. And this was less than a month after they had found similar amounts in the patient who died.
The two women were in the same ward of the Hyde Park branch of the University of Chicago Hospitals, as was a third woman who had Alzheimer’s and died after being discharged; she had symptoms consistent with high insulin levels but investigators are still waiting for her blood analysis.
Hospital spokesman John Easton said the blood test results should be back next week. The hospital authorities are conducting their own investigation and they don’t rule out medication error or laboratory error.
All three patients, who were older Chicago residents, became ill between 7th of May and 5th of June. According to the Chicago Tribune none was suffering from diabetes or had been prescribed insulin, but other reports quote Easton as saying that this may not be the case and he can’t be more specific because federal privacy laws prevent him from giving details of their medical records.
Othe reports say that Easton had told the press that two of the women did have medical reasons to receive insulin, but not the high levels found in their blood.
It has been suggested that the two patients had insulin levels of more than 2,600 micro international units per microlitre of blood; a normal insulin level would be around 10 to 50 units.
The son of the 89 year old woman with Alzheimer’s who died in a nursing home several weeks after being discharged from hospital was told that his mother had been given insulin to treat a symptom connected with her Alzheimer’s. He said his mother was already very sick and he did not believe she died of insulin overdose.
A police spokesman said that the police had not yet found evidence of criminal intent, but their investigations were still at a preliminary stage.
In the meantime, hospital investigators are going through old patient records to see if other cases of serum insulin spikes have occurred in the past. It has been reported that two other cases of high insulin are also being investigated with the help of an outside forensic team.
According to an update in USA Today, the hospital’s chief quality officer said it was very unusual for a hospital to call in the police to investigate a patient’s death, but they could not find a medical explanation and wanted to be as thorough as possible.
Meanwhile the hospital has tightened its procedures on the storage and use of insulin, which officials say it does not hold in large quantities. And it has also alerted the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) incase the root cause of the incidents is related to product integrity.
No member of staff has been fired or disciplined, they said.
Click here for University of Chicago Hospitals.
Written by: Catharine Paddock
Writer: Medical News Today