A One-Year Epidemiological Study of Acute Poisoning among Adults and Adolescents Admitted to Loghman Hospital, Tehran between 2005 and 2006

There is no specific center for poison control and surveillance in our country to gather information and analyze data. The Loghman Hospital is the only tertiary teaching hospital for poisoned patient in Tehran with more than 65 years of experience which serves from the resident population of capital city, so that most poisoned patients refer to this center. The aim of this study was to investigate the epidemiological feature of hospital-referred poisonings in Loghman hospital as a representative of capital city according to International Classification of Disease (ICD10). All adults and adolescents more than 12 years old admitted to the Emergency toxicology clinic of the Loghman hospital, from 21 March 2005 to 20 March 2006, were included in this study. We analyzed the clinical charts for etiological and demographical characteristics of the acutely poisoned patients whom were hospitalized. Variables including group of poisons, age, sex, history of mental illness and addiction, history of drug self poisoning and prognosis, were compiled and analyzed. Among 28,002 patients admitted to the Emergency toxicology clinic, there was 12,167(43.45%) poisoned cases (5,578 females and 6,545 males and 51 unknown). Intentional poisoning was more common (83.6%) than accidental exposures (16.4%) including drug abuses. Pharmaceutical drugs, especially antidepressants and sedative hypnotics were the major causes of intoxication which codified as T42 (21.6%) and T43 (15.4%), respectively, followed by T40 (11.8%) that mainly consisted of the opiates. The overall number of poisoned patients whom were hospitalized was a bit higher in spring and summer (51.5%). Three hundred and four patients were died due to acute poisoning or its complications. The majority of them was due to narcotics’ overdosage (33.22%), followed by pesticides (12.17%) (mostly aluminum phosphide), psychotropic drugs (8.55%) and alcohols (8.55%) (mostly methanol). Most of the deceased patients were male (73.35%) and 45.4% were below 40 years old. Although our rate of suicide is lower than western countries, the trend of deliberate self poisoning is more than population growth rate and because of substance abuse, the sex distribution of poisoning has been dramatically changed. It seems that national policy for controlling substance abuse is not efficient enough and needs urgent intervention, especially for high risk groups. To our knowledge, it seems that this unique center is the busiest clinical toxicology Department of the world.