Relationship between the start time of treatment and patient prognosis in cases of acute wild mushroom poisoning in a certain region of Guizhou Province, China from 2013 to 2020: A retrospective Observational Study and forecast.

Methods: This single-center, retrospective observational study was conducted on 455 patients with Undergoing Treatment for Mushroom Poisoning at Affiliated Hospital of Zunyi Medical University (AHZMU), the tertiary governmental hospital of China, between January 2013 and December 2020. We investigated the impact of prognostic factors, including the mortality rate of patients who completed treatment at AHZMU versus those transferred to AHZMU, average length of hospital stay, mortality rate for a latency period of > 6-h, major damaged organs, HOPE6-TALK scoring and established a predictive model to assess the severity of acute mushroom poisoning.

Results: In 2013-2020, there are 455 patients of mushroom poisoning at AHZMU. Mushroom poisonings mainly concentrated in the summer and autumn months, resulted in 47 patients deaths. The first diagnosis cases at AHZMU resulting in a case fatality rate of 12.77% (6/47), Non-first diagnosis patients fatality accounting for 87.23% (41/47). The majority of deaths (89.36%) were attributed to liver injury. Death with incubation period >6-h accounting for 70.21% (33/47) of the total mortality rate. Logistic regression analysis revealed age and HOPE6 scores as independent risk factors, thereby establishing the logistic model equation, an examination via the ROC curve analysis indicates that a combination predictor values (Y_coalition) of 289.6 is the cut-off values for death resulting from acute mushroom poisoning.

Conclusion: The attending physician should conduct an early HOPE6-TALK scoring and calculate the Y_coalition for patients with acute mushroom poisoning, as well as promptly identify the toxic mushrooms through morphological and molecular biological identification. Identify mushroom species and further infer the clinical type and clinical characteristics. For example, amanitoxion can cause acute liver injury with high mortality. Identify mushroom species that may cause organ damage so that timely implementation of the bundled therapy for poisonous mushrooms will increase the cure rate and reduce the mortality rate (Lu et al., 2019).