Impact of sex, age, race, ethnicity and aspirin use on bleeding symptoms in healthy adults.

BACKGROUND: Comparing a patient's bleeding symptoms with those of healthy individuals is an important component of the diagnosis of bleeding disorders, but little is known about whether bleeding symptoms in healthy individuals vary by sex, race, ethnicity, age, or aspirin use. OBJECTIVES, PATIENTS/METHODS: We developed a comprehensive, ontology-backed, Web-based questionnaire to collect bleeding histories from 500 healthy adults. The mean age was 43 years (range 19-86 years), 63% were female, 19% were Hispanic, 37% were African-American, 43% were Caucasian, 8% were Asian, and 4% were multiracial. RESULTS: 18 of the 36 symptoms captured occurred with < 5% frequency, and 26% of participants reported no bleeding symptoms (range 0-19 symptoms). Differences in sex, race, ethnicity, aspirin use and age accounted for only 6-13% of the variability in symptoms. Although men reported fewer symptoms than women (median 1 vs. 2, P < 0.01), there was no difference when sex-specific questions were excluded (median 1 for both men and women, P = 0.50). However, women reported more easy bruising (24% vs. 7%, P < 0.01) and venipuncture-related bruising (10% vs. 3%, P = 0.02). The number of symptoms did not vary by race or age, but epistaxis was reported more frequently by Caucasians than by African-Americans (29% vs. 18%, P = 0.02), and epistaxis frequency decreased with age (odds ratio 0.97 per year, P < 0.01). Paradoxically, infrequent aspirin users reported more bruising and heavy menses than frequent users (21% vs. 8%, P = 0.01, and 56% vs. 38%, P = 0.03, respectively). CONCLUSIONS: Our findings provide a contemporaneous and comprehensive description of bleeding symptoms in a diverse group of healthy individuals. Our Web-based system is freely available to other investigators.

Gastrocolic fistulae in benign peptic ulcer disease.

Occurence of gastroenteric fistulae in non-surgically treated peptic ulcer disease is rare as suggested by only 26 cases published in the literature so far. We had the opportunity to care for 3 patients with this problem in a period of one year. At our institution, a search of the medical records dating back to 1955 yielded one additional case. Most of our patients had a history of salicylate or corticosteroid intake. We present here the details of these cases and discuss the possible role of the location of the ulcer and ulcerogenic anti-inflammatory drug ingestion in the causation of gastroenteric fistula. We believe the incidence of this uncommon entity may rise significantly with the more common use of salicylates and corticosteroids.