Comparing foreign body injuries patterns between Turkey and European Countries: are female Turkish children more vulnerable?

Abstract

Objectives: The present study aimed at analyzing and comparing Foreign Body (FB) injuries patterns in children from Turkey and other European countries in order to assess any country and culturally specific aspects of FB risk.

Methods: Data from Susy Safe register were included in the analysis. For this study, ICD-935 (mouth, esophagus and stomach) and ICD-934 (trachea, bronchus, and lung) cases from European countries and from a single center in the Istanbul Bahcelievler State Hospital, Turkey, were extracted from the Susy database. A Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA) approach was employed to identify differences or similarities between the groups of FB injuries.

Results: The Turkey dataset has a larger proportion of females in comparison to the European data (p-value 0.002). According to the MCA analysis, the first two dimensions are explaining 48.11% of the variability (dimension 1, 37.44%; dimension 2, 10.67%). The three largest contributions to dimension 1 are via naturalis removal, not hospitalized, and ICD-935. The greatest contributions to dimension 2 are FB type, and consistency.

Conclusion: The most interesting study finding is the higher incidence of females suffering a FB injury in ICD-934-935 in the Turkey dataset compared to that seen in the European dataset and also higher than that for all ICD locations within the Susy Safe register. The higher incidence of females tends to go against the belief that boys suffer higher FB injuries and needs to be further investigated.

Keywords: Children; Foreign body injuries; Gender differences; Multiple correspondence analysis; Turkey.