Burn Injuries and Associated Causes in Al Kharj Province of Saudi Arabia: Are They Preventable?

Abstract

Introduction:Currently, studies investigated burn injuries and their causes in Saudi Arabia mainly focused on pediatric patients, while epidemiology of burns among the adult population required more exploration. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to investigate the pattern of burns and associated factors among both children and adults in one of the largest Saudi Arabian province. Methods: This is a surgical audit type study included patients admitted with the burns to the surgical department of King Khaled Hospital in Al Kharj province of Saudi Arabia. The medical records of 60 patients with burn injuries, admitted from 2010 to 2015 inclusive, were reviewed for demographic factors, the pattern of burns,the severity of burn injuries and associated trauma injury severity score (ISS), the length of hospital stay, the types of burns, and the most common body locations. Descriptive statistics including frequencies, percentages, means, and standard deviations were demonstrated in tables and graphs. Inferential statistics were used to detect significant study associations. The P values less than 0.05 were considered significant. Results: This study included 60 patients, where 57%were non-Saudis and the majority were adult males. The most affected body parts were the upper extremities followed by lower extremities and the head. The most common types of burns where hot liquid burns (43.3%), followed by flame burns (28.3%). The significant correlations were found between the mechanism of burn and patient's gender and age. The burns area was directly related to the length of hospital stay and correlated well to the age (p=0.037). Conclusion:The hot liquid burns are the most common types of burns followed by the flame burns. The hot liquid burns were commonly affecting Saudi nationality, children and female gender. The areas of burns are well correlated to the age of affected patients and the length of hospital stay.

Burn Injury Characteristics and Outcomes among Hospitalized Patients in Tertiary Burn Unit

“…The finding of this study reveals that males are predominantly affected as compared to females but this does not reach the significant statistical difference this finding does not agree with the findings of other researchers [21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28] while other study reported a similar finding in gender composition ratio [29] but our finding disagrees with the findings of other researchers who found that females were suffered burn injuries significantly more than males [30][31][32] . Regarding age of patients,this study clarifies that the vast majority of the victims are below 30 years of age and mainly children below ten years, this result is similar to result reported by other studies [26,33] and this explain why that most of the burn victims were male in gender due to that the boys are more susceptible to burn accidents because they are more active than the girls.…”