ARE YOU TAKING TOO MUCH NYQUIL?

NEW STUDY EXAMINES THE SURPRISING FUTILITY OF DRUG LABELING

By Anne Warde

According to a new study titled, “Dangerous Double Dosing: How Naive Beliefs Can Contribute to Unintentional Overdose with Overthe-Counter (OTC) Drugs,” consumers may not be considering active ingredients in medicines and thus risking overdose when taking two or more OTC drugs concurrently. Co-authored by Marketing Professor Connie Pechmann, Merage School PhD alumnus Jesse Catlin (now at California State University, Sacramento), and UCLA Professor Eric P. Brass, the study was announced by the American Marketing Association and is forthcoming in the Journal of Public Policy and Marketing.

“A consumer who takes a cold medicine containing, for instance, acetaminophen, may see nothing wrong with taking an additional medicine that also contains acetaminophen,” write authors Catlin, Pechmann and Brass. “But in that case, he or those doses are repeated every four to six hours, the consumer the limit.”

Study participants included people with and without medical expertise. They were asked to read the labels on the packages of two different OTC drugs and report whether the two contained the same active ingredients. They were also asked to judge the risks of taking the two drugs at the same time. Both groups correctly determined if the two drugs contained the same active ingredients, but only participants with medical expertise used that information to weigh the risks of taking two medications together.

For more information about the study, contact Jesse R. Catlin, jesse.catlin@csus.edu, or Mary-Ann Twist, mtwist@ama.org.

Cornelia (Connie) Pechmann (MS, MBA, PhD) is a professor of marketing at The Paul Merage School of Business, University of California Irvine. She studies the effects of advertising, social media, product labeling, brand names and retail store locations on consumers and

Professor Pechmann has received numerous grants and over and product placements in movies. This research persuaded movie studios to place anti-smoking ads on movie DVDs if the movies target youth and depict smoking. She is currently studying how to form effective online communities on Twitter for

She is the recipient of the Pollay Prize for Public Interest Research and has also received the best journal article award from the Journal of Consumer Research.