Prevalence and Life-Threatening Electrocardiographic Changes in Aluminum Phosphide Poisoned Patients

According to World Health Organization report, poisoning with phosphides is the most common fatal poisoning in most of the world, especially developing countries. One of the leading causes of morbidity and mortality in these patients is cardiovascular complications; therefore, the researchers aimed to study the prevalence and type of electrocardiographic changes, especially life-threatening electrocardiographic changes observed in poisoned patients with aluminum Phosphide.

This retrospective cohort study was carried out on all the individuals poisoned with aluminum phosphide tablet and were admitted to the toxicology center in northwest Iran and met the inclusion criteria and no exclusion criteria. After categorization, the data were entered into SPSS (SPSS Inc, Chicago, USA) software, and appropriate statistical analyses were done. In all the tests, p<0.05 was considered statistically significant. 

Our findings pointed out that the majority of the patients were in the 20-40 age group and male-to-female ratio was 2.00. Electrocardiographic changes were prevalent in 86.1 percent of the patients who consumed aluminum phosphide. The most common change was sinus bradycardia. The mean consumed aluminum phosphide was 1.93±1.88 tablets, and the mean interval from consumption to medical care was 3.67±2.05 hr which did not have significant correlations with electrocardiographic changes.

The most common electrocardiographic change is bradycardia, but the most lethal is ventricular tachycardia; therefore, taking repeated electrocardiograms and echocardiography could help the decision making in the process of patient management. Definitive conclusions need further studies.