Factors associated with adverse clinical features in patients presenting with non-fatal self-poisoning
Average rating
Cast your vote
You can rate an item by clicking the amount of stars they wish to award to this item.
When enough users have cast their vote on this item, the average rating will also be shown.
Star rating
Your vote was cast
Thank you for your feedback
Thank you for your feedback
Journal title
Emergency Medicine Journal
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
Background Drug overdose or self poisoning is an important reason for an ambulance service response. We aimed to undertake a preliminary investigation into the pattern of drug overdose presenting to one ambulance service and factors associated with adverse clinical features and treatment. Methods We examined data from clinical records obtained by ambulance crews attending non-fatal overdoses over 3 months. We produced descriptive statistics and used logistic regression to investigate predictors of adverse clinical features (reduced consciousness, obstructed airway, hypotensive and hypoglycaemia) and treatment. Results A total of 585 patients were identified over 3 months, giving a rate of 26 per 1000 ambulance requests. Paracetamol containing drugs were most commonly involved. About 8% of patients had taken an overdose of an illegal drug. Adverse clinical reactions occurred in 103 (17.7%) of patients. The odds of any adverse clinical feature was higher in men (OR 2.04; 95% CI 1.18 to 3.51) and overdose involving an opiate (OR 2.35; 95% CI 1.16 to 4.93) or an illegal drug (OR 2.51; 95% CI 1.05 to 5.96). The older the patient, the more likely they were to receive oxygen (OR 1.03; 95% CI 1.01 to 1.04). Patients with reduced consciousness also had a greater chance of receiving oxygen (OR 2.89; 95% CI 1.45 to 5.77) and/or saline (OR 8.00; 95% CI 3.32 to 19.28). Conclusion Non-fatal overdose or self poisoning accounts for 2.6% of patients attended by an ambulance. Gender, illegal or opioid containing drugs were important predictors of adverse clinical features. The treatments most often provided to patients were oxygen and saline. This provides an incite into the burden of overdose/poisoning as well as serve as a pilot for future research aimed at improving early management of overdose and poisoning. https://emj.bmj.com/content/emermed/28/3/e1.5.full.pdf This is an Open Access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/emj.2010.108605.13ae974a485f413a2113503eed53cd6c53
10.1136/emj.2010.108605.13
Scopus Count
Collections