Clinicians should be on alert for signs of medetomidine exposure and withdrawal in suspected overdose cases, public health experts said Thursday during a CDC webinar.

Hosted by the agency's Division of Overdose Prevention, the webinar highlighted growing concerns about medetomidine's increasing presence in the U.S. illicit drug supply -- often mixed with fentanyl -- and the clinical challenges of treating patients exposed to it. Experts also outlined management strategies for treating withdrawal and emphasized the difficulty of predicting which patients will require hospitalization or admission to the intensive care unit (ICU).

"We've had a hard time predicting who's going to be escalated," said Samantha Huo, MD, MPH, assistant professor of emergency medicine at the University of Pennsyl

See Full Page