Retrospective Evaluation of Children Who Applied to Emergency Department for Drinking a Corrosive Substance: Ten-year Experience

Abstract

Introduction:Corrosive substance intake, which has an important place in home accidents, is still an important public health problem in our country. In this study, it was aimed to investigate all aspects of patients who applied to the pediatric emergency department with corrosive substance intake in the last decade.Methods:All cases who applied to our pediatric emergency department between January 2009 and December 2018 with the complaint of drinking corrosive substances were included in the study. The demographic, clinical and laboratory data of the patients, and the features of the substance and complications during followup were analyzed retrospectively.Results:The median age of 450 cases included in the study was 24 (minimum: 3, maximum: 192) months and 61% (n=275) were male. It was observed that most of the patients (87%) applied by saying that they used items such as bleach, lime remover or sink opener, which are commonly used at home. In addition, the majority of poisonings (94%) were caused by open products that were forgotten by parents, while more than half of these products (53.50%) were non-branded products. In most of the patients (74%), other than drinking corrosive substances, no additional complaints were reported, while redness/swelling (25%), vomiting (17%) and restlessness (10%) were the most common complaints. The most common complication was mouth injury (23%). While 70 (15%) cases were performed endoscopy in total, 44 (10%) of them had esophagus injury. However, the development of esophageal stricture in follow-up occurred only in 2 cases.Conclusion:Almost all corrosive substance poisoning in childhood develops as a result of parental negligence. Families need to be more conscious to prevent this situation, which can have serious consequences.

Keywords

• corrosive
• abrasives
• children
• endoscopy