Food and Drug Reactions and AnaphylaxisEpidemiology of anaphylaxis among children and adolescents enrolled in a health maintenance organization
Section snippets
Study population
The study was based at Group Health Cooperative, a health maintenance organization (HMO) based in western Washington State. The study population consisted of the 229,422 children and adolescents under the age of 18 years enrolled at Group Health Cooperative for any duration between March 1, 1991, and December 31, 1997.
Definition of anaphylaxis
Our algorithm for assessing anaphylaxis (Fig 1) has been described previously.9 The decision to incorporate treatment was based on the observation that prompt treatment of an
Results
Of 781 diagnoses selected for chart review, 25 were excluded because of missing chart information. In addition, 3 duplicate diagnoses were excluded (the episode received more than one diagnosis of interest and appeared more than once in Table I). This left 753 diagnoses for review.
The code with the highest positive predictive value (PPV) for anaphylaxis was 995.0 (anaphylactic shock); approximately 55% of these visits were confirmed as “probable” or “possible” anaphylaxis (Table II). The code
Discussion
We have described the incidence and clinical characteristics of anaphylaxis in a large population of child and adolescent HMO enrollees. A previous study of anaphylaxis from all causes in a large general population was conducted by Yocum et al, who described the underlying causes of anaphylaxis in Olmsted County, Minnesota, from 1983 through 1987.2 In that study, which considered a broad range of diagnoses, 154 episodes of anaphylaxis occurred among 133 residents. The occurrence rate (which
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Cited by (0)
This study was supported by contract 200-0957 (the Vaccine Safety Datalink project) with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the American Association of Health Plans (AAHP). The findings and conclusions of this study do not necessarily represent the views or policies of the Department of Health and Human Services or AAHP.