Mushroom Poisoning Cases from an Emergency Department in Central Anatolia: Comparison and Evaluation of Wild and Cultivated Mushroom Poisoning

Abstract

Aim: To evaluate differences between cultivated and wild mushroom poisoning in terms of clinical characteristics, laboratory findings, and complications. We also aimed to determine the differences among patients in regard to presence of complications.Materials and Methods: We evaluated adults who were diagnosed with mushroom poisoning at Konya Training and Research Hospital ina 4-year period between January 2014 and December 2017. The following characteristics of patients were recorded: Age, sex, complaints, time until hospital admittance, time until symptom onset, mushroom source, any interventions until patient arrived to the hospital, laboratory findings, complications like acute renal failure, neurotoxicity, rhabdomyolysis, cardiotoxicity and mortality, length of stay (LoS) at hospital, and patient discharge status. All analyses were performed on SPSS v21. Kolmogorov-Smirnov test was used to determine normality of distribution. Continuous variables were analyzed with the Mann-Whitney U test and described as median (minimum-maximum). Categorical variables were analyzed with chi-square test and described as frequency (percentage). The relationships between continuous variables were determined by calculating Spearman correlation coefficients.Results: We included 168 patients (79 males and 89 females) in our study. The mean age was 46.66±18.66 years. The cause of poisoning was cultivated mushrooms for 57 (33.9%) patients and wild mushrooms for 111 (66.1%) patients. It was found that patients in the wild mushroom group were older than the patients in the cultivated mushroom group (p=0.006). Cultivated mushrooms were largely consumed by patients who live in metropolitan areas (p