Smoking, substance abuse, psychiatric history, and burns: trends in adult patients.

Keeping in mind the historical importance of the associations among smoking, substance abuse, psychiatric history, and burns, we collected the relevant data as part of a larger research project. A retrospective casenote review was conducted using 1981, 1991, and 2001 as reference years to identify the trends in acute adult admissions. In keeping with the increase in the total number of patients, burns victims who were smokers increased in numbers. The percentage increased in 2001 from other reference years, but it was not statistically significant. The results of our study also show no significant increase in trends as far as burns causation and alcohol/psychiatric history/drug dependence is concerned, but the prevalence of these conditions in burns patients has remained persistently high compared with the general population in the past 20 years.