Unsupervised exposures of infants and young children to melatonin have increased substantially in recent years, landing thousands of children in the emergency room.

The number of kids aged 5 and younger who went to an emergency room for unsupervised melatonin ingestion increased 420 percent from 2009 to 2020, according to new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

More recently, melatonin was implicated in approximately 11,000 emergency department visits among infants and young children between 2019–2022.