A population-based study of inpatients admitted due to suffocation in Taiwan during 2005-2007

The objective of this study was to analyze the epidemiology and factors associated with prognoses (inpatient fatality) of patients hospitalized due to suffocation. Data from 2005 to 2007 were sourced from the Taiwanese National Health Insurance Research Database. Suffocation was defined as E911-E915 according to the ICD-9-CM classification. In total, 4062 hospitalizations occurred in Taiwan due to suffocation from 2005 to 2007, with an inpatient fatality rate of 6.5%. Among hospitalizations due to suffocation, “foreign body unintentionally entering other orifice”, “food causing obstruction”, and “other object causing obstruction” accounted for 58.4%, 17.9%, and 11.0%, respectively. There were more cases of male inpatients than female patients; in terms of age, infants under 1 year old and the elderly aged 65 and over had the highest rates of hospitalization. Factors associated with inpatient fatality included “age”, “cardiac arrest”, “received surgery or procedure”, “acute respiratory failure”, “anoxic brain damage”, and “foreign body in larynx”. Infants and the elderly were high-risk groups for hospitalization as a result of suffocation; the dominant cause among inpatient fatality was “food causing obstruction”, which accounted for 22.2% of cases. Medical institutions should focus on the factors associated with inpatient fatality to improve prognoses and decrease the fatality rates of inpatients.