Adolescent Ingestions Presenting to a Pediatric Emergency Department

Copyright: 2015 © Ratnapalan S, et al. 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. Objectives: To evaluate incidence, motives and clinical outcomes of pre-teens and adolescents presenting to a pediatric emergency department with substance ingestions. Methods: A retrospective chart review was conducted of patients aged 10 to 18 year department presenting with substance ingestion, overdose or poisoning to a tertiary care pediatric emergency between January1,-2009 to December 31,2010. Demographic information, type of ingestions, motives and outcome information were collected and analyzed. Results: One hundred patients with a mean age of 15 (STD deviation 2) years were seen during the study period (70 females and 30 males). Psychiatric conditions were present in 50 % of the patients (n=50). The most common reason for ingestion was intentional attempted suicide (n=58) followed by intentional abuse (n=30), intentional misuse (n=5) and unintentional ingestions (n=7 of all the ingestions 39 % (n=39) needed admission to hospital of whom 2 were admitted to the intensive care unit. Suspected suicides accounted for 92 % of admissions. There were no deaths