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Events Due to Snowblower Use Seen in US Emergency Departments From 2003 Through 2018

Objective To comprehensively analyze emergency department (ED) visits associated with snowblower use in the United States. Methods Data on National Electronic Injury Surveillance System ED visits due to snow blowers from 2003 through 2018 were analyzed by age, sex, diagnosis, anatomic location of th...

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Autores principales: Loder, Randall T, Solanki, Dhruv
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Cureus 2020
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7781562/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33409076
http://dx.doi.org/10.7759/cureus.11836
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author Loder, Randall T
Solanki, Dhruv
author_facet Loder, Randall T
Solanki, Dhruv
author_sort Loder, Randall T
collection PubMed
description Objective To comprehensively analyze emergency department (ED) visits associated with snowblower use in the United States. Methods Data on National Electronic Injury Surveillance System ED visits due to snow blowers from 2003 through 2018 were analyzed by age, sex, diagnosis, anatomic location of the injury, and year, month, or weekday. The mechanism of injury and alcohol use were noted. Statistical analyses were performed, accounting for the weighted, stratified nature of the data. Results There were an estimated 91,451 patients with an average age of 51 years; 91.2% were male. Amputation, fracture, or laceration accounted for 43,524 (47.6%) of the ED visits. The mechanism of injury was placing the hand into the chute (44.5%), a fall/slip (13.3%), medical events (6.1%), and miscellaneous (33.8%). Most (68.9%) occurred at home. Alcohol was rarely involved (0.4%). There were 648 deaths; 647 were due to cardiac events. The five major injury diagnoses were fracture (25.9%), laceration (20.2%), strain/sprain (15.0%), amputation (11.2%), and contusion/abrasion (10.2%); 99.8% of the amputations involved fingers. The incidence of ED snowblower visits was 1.845 per 100,000 US population with no change over time. There was a general correlation between the number of visits and the annual snow cover. Conclusions Ample opportunity for injury prevention exists, as there was no change in the incidence over time. Cardiac events accounted for essentially all of the deaths.
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spelling pubmed-77815622021-01-05 Events Due to Snowblower Use Seen in US Emergency Departments From 2003 Through 2018 Loder, Randall T Solanki, Dhruv Cureus Emergency Medicine Objective To comprehensively analyze emergency department (ED) visits associated with snowblower use in the United States. Methods Data on National Electronic Injury Surveillance System ED visits due to snow blowers from 2003 through 2018 were analyzed by age, sex, diagnosis, anatomic location of the injury, and year, month, or weekday. The mechanism of injury and alcohol use were noted. Statistical analyses were performed, accounting for the weighted, stratified nature of the data. Results There were an estimated 91,451 patients with an average age of 51 years; 91.2% were male. Amputation, fracture, or laceration accounted for 43,524 (47.6%) of the ED visits. The mechanism of injury was placing the hand into the chute (44.5%), a fall/slip (13.3%), medical events (6.1%), and miscellaneous (33.8%). Most (68.9%) occurred at home. Alcohol was rarely involved (0.4%). There were 648 deaths; 647 were due to cardiac events. The five major injury diagnoses were fracture (25.9%), laceration (20.2%), strain/sprain (15.0%), amputation (11.2%), and contusion/abrasion (10.2%); 99.8% of the amputations involved fingers. The incidence of ED snowblower visits was 1.845 per 100,000 US population with no change over time. There was a general correlation between the number of visits and the annual snow cover. Conclusions Ample opportunity for injury prevention exists, as there was no change in the incidence over time. Cardiac events accounted for essentially all of the deaths. Cureus 2020-12-01 /pmc/articles/PMC7781562/ /pubmed/33409076 http://dx.doi.org/10.7759/cureus.11836 Text en Copyright © 2020, Loder et al. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
spellingShingle Emergency Medicine
Loder, Randall T
Solanki, Dhruv
Events Due to Snowblower Use Seen in US Emergency Departments From 2003 Through 2018
title Events Due to Snowblower Use Seen in US Emergency Departments From 2003 Through 2018
title_full Events Due to Snowblower Use Seen in US Emergency Departments From 2003 Through 2018
title_fullStr Events Due to Snowblower Use Seen in US Emergency Departments From 2003 Through 2018
title_full_unstemmed Events Due to Snowblower Use Seen in US Emergency Departments From 2003 Through 2018
title_short Events Due to Snowblower Use Seen in US Emergency Departments From 2003 Through 2018
title_sort events due to snowblower use seen in us emergency departments from 2003 through 2018
topic Emergency Medicine
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7781562/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33409076
http://dx.doi.org/10.7759/cureus.11836
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