Hand Dominance and Blood Group: Association in Epistaxis

The present work was undertaken to study the association of epistaxis with hand dominance and blood group. The present cross sectional study was conducted among 360 cases of epistaxis who reported to the E.N.T outpatient department of tertiary care centre in central India during the period of July 2014 to July 2015. Examination was carried out by self prepared Performa which included demographic information, detailed history and clinical examination findings. Total of 360 patients were included in the study, the mean age being 31.2 years of which there were 208 males and 152 female. Most of the patients (48.9 %) presented with 4-6 episodes of nasal bleed per year. In present study, local trauma (22.2 %) followed by nose picking (16.7 %) were the commonest local etiological factors while Idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura, pancytopenia etc. (15.6 %) being the commonest of general causes followed by hypertension (13.4 %). The study showed highly significant association of A^+ve blood group with epistaxis (p = 0.002). Most of the patients (54.8 %) presented bleeding episodes mainly in summer season. In our study we found statistically significant (p = 0.0001) association of hand dominance and side of nasal bleeding. Anterior nasal bleeding was significantly more presenting symptom in all epistaxis patients. This study underlines the importance of epistaxis as the most frequent emergency diagnosis in ENT. The observed association of A^+ve blood group and Hand dominance in epistaxis provokes to have further large scale studies in this area.