%0 Journal Article
%T Medical Treatment for Burn Patients with Eating Disorders: A Case Report
%A Minekatsu Akimoto
%A Akira Takeda
%A Kazutaka Nagashima
%A Rie Uehara
%A Mitsuru Nemoto
%A Eiju Uchinuma
%J Plastic Surgery International
%D 2011
%I Hindawi Publishing Corporation
%R 10.1155/2011/370981
%X There have been many cases of burn patients who also suffer from psychiatric problems, including eating disorders. We present a case of a 38-year-old female with an eating disorder and depression who became light-headed and fell, spilling boiling water from a kettle on herself at home sustaining partial thickness and full thickness burns over 5% of her total body surface area: left buttock and right thigh and calf. Eating disorders (in the present case, anorexia nervosa) cause emaciation and malnutrition, and consent for hospitalization from the patient and/or family is often difficult. During the medical treatment of burns for these patients, consideration not only of physical symptoms caused by malnutrition but also the psychiatric issues is required. Therefore, multifaceted and complex care must be given to burn patients with eating disorders. 1. Introduction It is common that burn patients are often comorbid with psychiatric problems. In the United States of America, the United Kingdom, and Australia, self-inflicted burn patients account for 1% to 5% of all burn patients, and about 70% of them had psychiatric histories [1¨C4]. In our hospital from 1995 to 1999, 32.1% of severe burn patients suffered self-inflicted burns, and 60% of them had psychiatric histories [5]. High rates of self-inflicted burns in the Asian population have been reported [6]. The percentage of patients with psychiatric histories among the nonself-inflicted burn patients is unknown. When treating severe burn patients under sedation with tracheal intubation in the burn center, it is relatively not difficult to concurrently manage psychiatric disorders. During the acute stage for severe burns, systemic and wound management should be given a high priority. Psychiatric care would be required after the patient regains consciousness, after extubation, and during rehabilitation. On the other hand, in the treatment of patients with a burn covering a small area of the body that is not life threatening, concurrent psychiatric care would be beneficial during the course of the burn treatment. Sometimes, unless consent for such treatment and hospitalization is obtained, the treatment period can be prolonged because of the interruption caused by the surgical therapy. The eating disorder, anorexia nervosa, is a disease with comorbid physical symptoms and a mental disorder due to emaciation for which the treatment is sometimes difficult even in the psychiatry department. In the case of patients with malnutrition and extreme emaciation, very often consent for treatment and hospitalization cannot
%U http://www.hindawi.com/journals/psi/2011/370981/