Acute Poisoning in Children in Bahia, Brazil

Abstract

Acute poisoning is a frequent accident in childhood, particularly in children under 4 years of age. This was a descriptive study with data collected from standardized forms of the Poison Control Center and patient record charts. All the cases of acute poisoning in children aged 0 to 14 years during the period 2008 to 2012 were selected. The variables studied comprised characteristics of the events and toxic agents, clinical development, and outcome. A total of 657 cases of acute poisoning, with higher frequency in the age-group from 1 to 4 years (48.7%) and male sex (53.4%), were recorded. The occurrences were accidental in 92% of the cases, and 5.8% were due to suicide attempts. Among the toxic agents, medications (28.5%), venomous animals (19.3%), nonvenomous animals (10%), household cleaning products (9.0%), and raticide agents (8.7%) predominated. The majority of cases were characterized as light (73.5%) and around 18% required hospitalization, and there was low lethality (0.5%).

Childhood acute poisoning in the Italian North-West area: a six-year retrospective study

“…Interestingly, our series lacks the second peak in children aged 10-14 ( Fig. 1b): we report a 2.3% of suicide attempts, a low percentage if compared with other studies [10,11,15,[18][19][20]. Nevertheless, the small rate of suicides found in our study might be influenced by the upper age limit of the population considered, which reaches up to 14 years.…”

“…Notably, no hospitalization in the pediatric intensive care unit and no deaths were recorded in our series: to the best of our knowledge only two other papers published in 2019 reported no deaths [2,13]; many other previous studies worldwide declared at least some cases [4,7,12,15,18,19,[24][25][26][27].…”

“…Although in most countries (Taiwan, Iran, Qatar, Turkey, Brazil) the leading cause of intoxications is Pharmaceuticals [13,15,18,24], in our paper we report that three out of five children were intoxicated by Nonpharmaceutical agents, in agreement also with a report led in the Italian North-East 20 years ago [8]. This aspect seems of particular relevance since in these two decades many initiatives have been taken to prevent exposure to household cleansers, such as including labeling and icons on the packaging.…”

Effect of haloperidol on centrilobular vein and portal triad of liver in the albino rats during intrauterine life

“…12 Better outcome is related to earlier presentation in emergency. In our study, poison ingestion was accidental in 87.8 % of the cases which is comparable to those reported by Mendonca et al 8 We found that poisoning agent was located at home in 81.1% of the cases. Home is the place where children spend most of their time before school going age so it becomes the place with greater number of mishaps including poisoning.…”

“…less family care and vigilance for male children leading to increased liberty in their routine activities with lesser supervision. 8 Majority of the cases was between 13-59 months of age followed by 5-10 years of age. In previous studies, acute poisoning has been observed more in children aged up to 5 years and peak at 2 to 3 years of age.…”