-
- C Maier, J Iwunna, M Tsokos, and F Mußhoff.
- Abteilung für Schmerzmedizin, Berufsgenossenschaftliches Universitätsklinikum Bergmannsheil gGmbH, Bürkle-de-la-Camp-Platz 1, 44789, Bochum, Deutschland. christoph.maier@rub.de.
- Anaesthesist. 2017 Feb 1; 66 (2): 109-114.
AbstractPrevious references suggesting a high mortality of propofol addiction in medical personnel were mostly based on surveys of the heads of medical departments or case reports; therefore, a questionnaire was sent to 48 forensic medicine departments in Germany, Austria and Switzerland concerning the number of autopsies carried out between 2002-2112 on medical personnel with the suspicion of abuse of propofol or other analgesics. The response rate was 67%. In 16 out of the 32 responding departments 39 deaths (27 males) were observed with previous connections to anesthesiology, intensive care or emergency departments of which 22 were physicians, 13 nurses, 2 other personnel and 2 were unknown. Propofol was the major cause of death in 33 cases (85%), in 8 cases including 7 with propofol, an unintentional accident was recorded and 29 were determined to be suicide. In 14 cases chronic abuse was denied but actually excluded by toxicological analysis in only 2 cases. In 11 cases involving suicide the question of abuse was not investigated. This survey confirmed previous data about the central role of propofol for the fatal outcome of addiction and suicide of anesthetists and other medical personnel. A dual prevention strategy with low-threshold offers for persons at risk and strategies for early detection is urgently needed including a stricter control of dispensing, improvement in forensic medical documentation and the use of toxicological investigations in every case of suspected abuse.
Notes
Knowledge, pearl, summary or comment to share?You can also include formatting, links, images and footnotes in your notes
- Simple formatting can be added to notes, such as
*italics*
,_underline_
or**bold**
. - Superscript can be denoted by
<sup>text</sup>
and subscript<sub>text</sub>
. - Numbered or bulleted lists can be created using either numbered lines
1. 2. 3.
, hyphens-
or asterisks*
. - Links can be included with:
[my link to pubmed](http://pubmed.com)
- Images can be included with:
![alt text](https://bestmedicaljournal.com/study_graph.jpg "Image Title Text")
- For footnotes use
[^1](This is a footnote.)
inline. - Or use an inline reference
[^1]
to refer to a longer footnote elseweher in the document[^1]: This is a long footnote.
.