Poisoning project

I'm actually starting on my second week at Ft. Meade, which means I've really procrastinated about summing up my AFHSC rotation. As I mentioned before, my project was on poisoning hospitalizations in the military from 2001-2010, figuring out which of those were intentional, and finding risk factors of intentional poisoning compared to those that are unintentional. Here's what we got for total numbers:

I also looked into what people were being poisoned with. The top contenders are pain medications and psych medications (surprise, surprise).

The next part was to look into which hospitalizations were intentional. For this, I used an algorithm that was published in the civilian medical literature that looks into certain psych diagnoses during the hospitalization for poisoning. Surprisingly enough, despite the increases in psych diagnoses in the military over the last ten years, the percentage of poisonings that were intentional has remained fairly constant (with a very slight increase).

Risk factors for intentional poisonings were drug (medication) overdoses, being female, married, black, a recruit, in the Navy, and multiple deployments. Protective factors are age over 40, currently being deployed, being in the Marine Corps, and increasing rank (which goes along with being older).

I presented that about a week and a half ago and got a fairly good reception. Previous residents were only on that rotation for four weeks, instead of the six that I (and my fellow residents) have, so I was able to do more analysis than they were accustomed to seeing. All in all, it was a good rotation and a good refresher on the epidemiology. I'm still trying to get in the swing of my current rotation (preventive medicine department at Ft. Meade). I hope this one ends up being a good learning experience as well.