Intoxicações medicamentosas acidentais em crianças de zero a nove anos na região nordeste e no Brasil

Abstract

Exogenous drug poisoning is a relevant problem in the field of Public Health in Brazil. Accidental drug exposure often occurs during childhood, indicating the need to understand the event during this life cycle. Therefore, the objective of this study was to analyze accidental exogenous drug poisoning in children aged zero to nine years in the Northeast region and in Brazil between 2012 and 2021. An ecological trial was carried out with information available in open access from the Notifiable Diseases Information System, linked to the Brazilian Unified Health System. In an analytical and quantitative approach, as a time series, the annual amounts of notifications with the outlined profile of the last ten years were retrieved, characterizing them quantitatively and estimating the temporal tendency with a significance level of 5% in the Northeast region and in Brazil. In the defined period, 34.576 notifications of confirmed exogenous drug poisoning were made in children aged zero to nine years, of which 8.271 (23.9%) were in the Northeast region. After normalizing for the estimated number of residents, it was observed that there was a significant, positive and strong correlation between the annual amount of notifications in the Northeast region and in Brazil in the last ten years (P-value = 0.001, ? = 0.893). However, the annual median was significantly higher in the national estimate, with a moderate effect size (P-valor = 0.021, m = 0.620). The temporal tendency has been significantly increasing over the last ten years in the Northeast region and in Brazil (P-value = 0.003 e 0.014, respectively). There was no difference between male and female children. At last, a significant decrease in the amount of monthly notifications was observed during the COVID-19 pandemic in the Northeast region and in Brazil (both P-values <0.05). It is possible to conclude that accidental exogenous drug poisoning in children aged zero to nine years remains a relevant problem in Public Health.