You are here

Article Text

Article menu

Download PDFPDF

Respiratory epidemiology
London ambulance source data on choking incidence for the calendar year 2016: an observational study
  1. Matthew J Pavitt1,
  2. Joanne Nevett2,
  3. Laura L Swanton1,
  4. Matthew D Hind1,
  5. Michael I Polkey1,
  6. Malcolm Green1 and
  7. Nicholas S Hopkinson1
  1. 1 NIHR Respiratory Biomedical Research Unit, Royal Brompton Hospital, Harefield NHS Foundation Trust and Imperial College, London, UK
  2. 2 London Ambulance Service, London, UK
  1. Correspondence to Dr Matthew J Pavitt, NIHR Respiratory Biomedical Research Unit Royal Brompton Hospital, Harefield NHS Foundation Trust and Imperial College London UK ; M.Pavitt{at}rbht.nhs.uk

Abstract

Introduction Complete foreign body airway obstruction is a life-threatening emergency, but there are limited data on its epidemiology.

Methods We conducted a retrospective analysis of data collected routinely from London Ambulance Service calls coded as being for choking was undertaken for the calendar year of 2016.

Results There were 1916 choking episodes of significant severity to call for emergency assessment in London during 2016, 0.2% of total calls requiring an ambulance response, an average of 5.2 per day. The incidence increased at the extremes of age. Calls coded as choking occurred at times consistent with lunch and dinner and less frequently at breakfast. Peak incidence occurred at Sunday lunchtimes and on Wednesday evenings.

Conclusions Choking is a substantial health problem for Londoners to seek emergency assistance. Choking is more frequent at the extremes of age with a higher incidence at lunch and dinner time. Greater public awareness of choking and its management could help to prevent avoidable deaths.

  • clinical epidemiology
  • respiratory muscles

This is an Open Access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/

https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjresp-2017-000215

Statistics from Altmetric.com

    Request Permissions

    If you wish to reuse any or all of this article please use the link below which will take you to the Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink service. You will be able to get a quick price and instant permission to reuse the content in many different ways.

    View Full Text

    Footnotes

    • Contributors NSH and MG conceived the study. MJP, JN, MG and NSH wrote the survey. JN collected the LAS data. MJP and LLS analysed the results and produced the first draft of the paper. JN, MDH, MIP, MG and NHS contributed and approved the final version of the paper.

    • Disclaimer Dr NS Hopkinson affirms that the manuscript is an honest, accurate, and transparent account of the study being reported; that no important aspects of the study have been omitted; and that any discrepancies from the study as planned (and, if relevant, registered) have been explained.

    • Competing interests None declared.

    • Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.