Investigating the Unintentional Poisoning Epidemiology in Prehospital Emergency Center in Qaemshahr City, Iran

Background and Objective: Unintentional poisoning is a critical type of poisoning by which people injure themselves with no intention. Such a condition occurs accidentally, occupationally, or through abusive manners. The present study aims to examine the one-year frequency and causes of unintentional poisoning in patients treated by the prehospital emergency center in Qaemshahr City, Iran, in 2016. Methods: This is a cross-sectional descriptive study of 259 patients with unintentional poisoning. The variables were extracted and then registered in the questionnaires. The data were analyzed by the  SPSS software. Results: In this study, 83.8% of the patients were male and 16.2% were female. Most toxicity cases (89.1%) were unintentional as a result of drug abuse in the forms of tramadol abuse (42.8%), narcotic drugs (26.6%), and alcohol (19.7%), ranking 1 to 3, respectively.  A total of 48.2% of the unintentional poisoning cases were caused by medicinal factors and other cases (51.8%) were due to non-medicinal agents. Benzodiazepines and cardiovascular drugs were the most common drugs causing a medicinal overdose. Gastrointestinal poisoning was the most prevalent way of toxicity (77.6%) and the rate of death was 4%. Conclusion: The results of the present study and similar research show that unintentional poisoning includes large populations of toxicity cases that occur mainly by drug abuse, such as tramadol and narcotic drugs. This study can be considered a pattern to conduct more research in the relevant fields.