Incidence of anaphylaxis and subtypes of anaphylaxis in a general hospital emergency department

Background: the absence of large-scale international studies means that data on anaphylaxis in emergency departments in different geographic areas are still necessary. objective: to determine the incidence of anaphylaxis and subtypes of anaphylaxis and their distribution by age group in the emergency department of hospital universitario fundación alcorcon,alcorcon (madrid),spain. methods: our study was performed between 2004 and 2005. we used the definition of anaphylaxis established by the niaid-faan symposium. patient information was collected from the electronic clinical records of the emergency department using alphanumeric strings to identify acute allergic illnesses. this strategy recovered 91.7% of all anaphylaxis episodes in a pilot study. results: we observed a crude cumulative incidence of 0.9 episodes of anaphylaxis per 1000 emergency episodes (95% confidence interval [ci],0.8-1.1),and 0.8 episodes per 1000 people (95% ci,0.7-0.9). standardized cumulative incidence of anaphylaxis according to the standardized european population was 1.1 (95% ci,0.9-1.2). on analyzing the 213 cases of anaphylaxis,we discovered that the main cause was food (28.6%),followed by drugs (28.2%),unknown causes (27.2%),anisakis (10.8%),hymenoptera venom (3.3%),exercise (2.4%),and latex (0.9%). food-induced anaphylaxis was less frequent in all groups older than the 0-4 age group in both reference populations (people who attend the emergency department and the general population). conclusions: the cumulative incidence of anaphylaxis in our emergency department is low. anaphylaxis by foods is more frequent in the 0-4 year group than in the other age groups. drugs and food are the most frequent causes of anaphylaxis in our emergency department. © 2011 esmon publicidad.