A population-based questionnaire study on the prevalence and epidemiology of burn patients in Denizli, Turkey

Epidemiological investigations of burn patients help health services to identify the need for burn care and to plan burn care facilities. Various epidemiological studies on burn injury have been conducted, but they have usually covered major burn victims who required hospitalization or minor burn victims who were treated at health care centers. Few studies have included burn victims who were not admitted to any health care center. Through a population-based questionnaire, we studied the epidemiology of the entire population of burn victims, including those who did not seek medical attention. Thus, we identified the actual frequency of hospital admission and the frequency of sequelae. In total, 1068 persons from the city of Denizli, Turkey were questioned about burns in the last 10 years and the burn prevalence was found to be 12.6%. Only 33.3% of the burn victims were treated at a health care center; thus, 66.7% of the victims were treated at home with traditional burn wound care methods. Etiologic factors such as the age and sex of each victim, the cause and anatomic location of the burn, and location of the victim when burned were all investigated. The overall percentage of sequelae was 31.3%; of these, 89.5% were cosmetic problems, 7.9% were functional impairments, and 2.9% were physiological problems. The low percentage of health care center admissions and high incidence of sequelae suggest the need for professional burn care centers that can be easily reached by burn victims.