Socio-demographic aspects of chronic urticaria and the structure of hospitalization in patients of the Department of Dermatology, Poznan University of Medical Sciences

Introduction
Urticaria is a disease with a complex pathomechanism that is characterized by the occurrence of wheals, edema or both.

Objective
To analyze the demographic aspects in a chronic urticaria patient and the structure of his hospitalization.

Material and methods
The study was divided into two parts – the retrospective part (R) and the prospective part (P). The retrospective part included 441 chronic urticaria patients at the age of 15 or older, hospitalized during the recent 10 years. The study analyzed history of the disease and database was established. For the prospective analysis 78 patients have been selected out of 441 subjects qualified for retrospective analysis, suffering from chronic aspirin-exacerbated disease, spontaneous, autoimmune and induced urticaria.

Results
Chronic urticaria mainly affected women (75.7% R; 79.5% P). The vast majority of patients lived in the city (75.7% R; 64.1% P) and most of them were professionally active (50.1% R; 56.4% P). In the prospective part it was found that over half of the group still had chronic urticaria (55.1%). Most patients were admitted to the Department in March (11.1%) or February (10.4%). The referring specialist was most commonly a dermatologist (95%). Least commonly the patients were referred by general practitioners (2%).

Conclusions
The results obtained in this analysis suggest a correlation between the severity of symptoms and increased diversity of the diet, as well as a lower number of admissions during vacation time.