Trends in acute adult poisoning in a ten-year period in Turkey: factors affecting the hazardous outcome.
OBJECTIVE
The aim of this study was to evaluate the trends in acute adult poisoning data during ten years in university emergency department and determine the factors of hazardous outcome such as severe clinical status, prolonged hospital stay and mortality.


METHODS
Medical records of 4569 poisoned patients admitted to Emergency Department (ED) of Qukurova University, School of Medicine in Adana.


RESULTS
The mean age of 2988 females (65.4% of the patients) was 24.5+/-10.1 years, whilst the mean age of 1581 male patients (34.6%) was 29.5+/-13.2 years (p=0.001). Of the poisonings 80.0% were suicidal; 69.4% of the women and 30.6% of the men committed suicide. The most common types of poisonings were ingestion of drugs (58.4%), organophosphates (23.9%) corrosives (3.4%), mushrooms (1.7%), methanol (2.4%), carbon monoxide (2.1%) and unknown (8.1%). Of the total 96.0% were discharged from emergency department, 1.4% transferred to IC and 2.6% died.


CONCLUSIONS
Young people and women are high-risk groups for acute poisoning and drug poisoning was found to be the most common type of poisoning. The poisoning by psychoactive drugs is increasinging in the recent years and organophosphates poisoning seems to be still a serious problem in such an agricultural area. However, while the ratios of prolonged hospitalization and mortality are decreasing, suicidal poisoning is seriously increasing (Tab. 4, Fig. 2, Ref. 34). Full Text (Free, PDF) www.bmj.sk.
Satar
Salim
S
Cukurova University, School of Medicine, Department of Emergency Medicine, Balcali, Adana, Turkey. salim.satar@yahoo.com
Seydaoglu
Gulsah
G
Akpinar
Ayca
A
Sebe
Ahmet
A
Karakoc
Emre
E
Gumusay
Umut
U
Yilmaz
Mustafa
M
Gokel
Yuksel
Y
D000328:Adult; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011041:Poisoning / Q000453:epidemiology* / Q000209:etiology; D013405:Suicide / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D014421:Turkey / Q000453:epidemiology