Comparison of two different epidemiological profiles of otorhinolaryngology emergencies.

Andrade et al. published on the May/June 2013 issue of this journal an interesting article on otorhinolaryngology (ENT) emergencies (‘‘Profile of otorhinolaryngology emergency unit care in a high complexity public hospital’’).1 The aim of this letter is to compare and comment what has been published to our data. We retrospectively reviewed all patients sent for urgent/emergent consultation to our ENT emergency room (ER) from the general emergency department (ED) between two periods of time: from June 1 to July 31, 2012, and from November 1 to December 31, 2012. In our hospital, the protocol for referrals states that patients do not have direct access to the ENT ER and they need to be triaged by the ED consultant who establishes the level of urgency/emergency and the need for ENT evaluation. We considered all patients referred for evaluation through this way, thus excluding patients triaged in general practice (GP) and referred to us as planned consultation within 24 h. We collected 2021 ENT emergency cases: among these, 18 cases were excluded for lack of data. The remaining 2003 cases were included in the review. The mean age at presentation was 46 ± 25 years old, with a median of 45 years. The demographic results and the ten most common diagnoses for referral are shown in Table 1. When classified for subspecialties, we found a lower rate of otological complaints (986 cases -49.23% vs. 65.41% reported by Andrade et al.1 and 62.27% reported by Furtado et al.)2 and a higher rate of head and neck complaints (204