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

BACKGROUND: Data about acute poisoning in Italian pediatric patients are obsolete or absent. This study would partially fill this exiting gap and compare the scene with others around the world. METHODS: A retrospective evaluation was performed on a 2012–2017 data registry of the Children’s Emergency Department at the Regina Margherita Hospital of Turin, where 1030 children under age 14 were accepted with a diagnosis of acute intoxication. RESULTS: The median age of the patients was 2.2 years (IQR 2.3) and 55% were male. Events occurred mostly in children aged 1–4 years (n = 751, 72.9%). Six hundred and eight patients (59%) were exposed to Nonpharmaceutical agents, the household cleaning products being the more frequent (n = 298, 49%). Exposure to Pharmaceuticals were 422 (41%); the most common Pharmaceuticals were analgesics (n = 88, 20.8%), psychotropics (n = 77, 18.2%) and cardiovascular (n = 53, 12.6%) drugs. The 85% of the intoxications occurred accidentally, the 10.6% as therapeutic error, the 2.3% as suicide attempts and the 1.5% for recreational purposes. No patient died. CONCLUSIONS: Despite acute poisoning being a relevant problem in pediatric emergency, our results would seem to paint a less worrying picture if compared to other countries, mainly when considering the children hospitalized in the pediatric intensive care unit and the number of deaths. Nevertheless, our study might represent a tool for public health authorities to program incisive interventions.