Epistaxis Mortality

NOSE bleeding ceases spontaneously in most cases and is usually a trivial complaint (Hallberg, 1952). It is however a potentially fatal condition and death probably occurs more often than is generally supposed. Although there has from time to time been considerable discussion about the management of epistaxis, this has mainly dealt with the surgical measures necessary to stop the bleeding. Less attention has been paid to the management of the systemic complications of severe epistaxis, i.e. hypotension and anaemia, and to the place of transfusion in their correction. In this paper seven fatal cases are described, with note of the post-mortem findings in five of them. Cardiovascular factors were found to be of considerable importance in all of them.