Acute Alcohol Intoxication in Pediatric Emergencies

The objectives of this study are to define the prevalence of acute alcohol intoxication in the pediatric emergency department (PED) and to describe the associated symptoms and their relationship with potential risk factors. Methods and Material This cross-sectional study includes patients younger than 16 years with a diagnosis of acute alcohol intoxication between March 2010 and October 2018 in the PED of a tertiary hospital. Patients with concomitant intoxication by other substances were excluded. The association between qualitative variables was determined using the χ2 or Fisher exact test and quantitative with the Student t, Mann-Whitney U test, and simple linear regression. Results There were 136 episodes of alcohol intoxication, which represents a prevalence of 24.1/100,000 emergencies. After excluding 10 patients because of positive screening for other drugs, 126 patients with a mean age of 14.5 years (SD, 1.2 years) were included, 57.9% of whom were women. A total of 25.4% of the patients were younger than 14 years. Ethanolemia was determined in 88.9%, and its mean concentration was 195.7 mg/dL (SD, 56.5 mg/dL), with potentially serious levels (>300 mg/dL) being found in 3.6% of the patients. A relationship was found between the Glasgow Coma Scale score and ethanolemia (B = −12.7; 95% confidence interval, −8.1 to −17.4; P
Source: Pediatric Emergency Care - Category: Emergency Medicine Tags: Original Articles Source Type: research