Updates in teenage acute intentional self-poisonings

Abstract

Acute intentional poisonings represent an important part of emergency pediatric pathology, as well as a psychiatric one, with an escalation tendency over the past years. The current paper consists of a descriptive prospective study, which took place over 12 months, and included 342 children within the age range 6-18 years, that presented in the Emergency Unit, being subsequently treated as in-patients of the Pediatric Poisoning Center of “Grigore Alexandrescu” Emergency Clinical Hospital for Children. The number of pediatric acute intentional poisonings hospitalized within the time frame of the study was 819 cases. Of these, 342 were intentional, which constitutes a percentage of 41.75%, and 477 were accidental, i.e. 58.24%. The etiology of the acute intentional poisonings is varied; however, medication (54.38%), ethanol (28.65%), and drugs of abuse (12.28%) were predominant. A higher frequency of acute intentional poisonings was noticed in girls (65.49%) as compared to boys (34.50%), probably due to the particularities the psychological profile of this sex shown at this age, i.e. higher emotional instability and display tendency. Out of the total number of acute intentional poisonings, we identified 20 cases of suicide attempts, which represent 5.83% of the total acute voluntary poisonings. Moreover, some of these cases constitute a repeated suicide attempts. The studied group included 30 cases of chronic substance abuse and 6 chronic alcohol abuse cases, with ages within the 13-17 years range, 12 of which were females and 24 males. Out of the 36 chronic substance/alcohol abuse patients, 4 were social cases. Pediatric acute intentional self-poisoning is an important public health issue, alarming through its consequences and its hidden neuropsychiatric and behavioral substrate. This is because adolescence is a period of marked emotional fragility, sensitive to all sorts of influences.