Total burn mortalities in Brazil: 10 years study

• First large Brazilian study comparing burn mortality with sociodemographic aspects. • Regions with the lowest demographic density have municipalities with high mortality. • Thermal and electrical burns present different correlations with demographic aspects. • This is the first study to compare the different burn mortality databases in Brazil. Brazil is a large country with a high incidence of burn injuries and socio-economic disparities among its states that affect access to burn care. However, Brazil does not have a national burn database, and most of the research on burns analyzes local burn units’ registries. This study aimed to assess burn-related pre- and in-hospital mortality in Brazil between 2010 and 2019 and to investigate its relationship with sociodemographic aspects. We have performed a cross-sectional study using publicly available data. Two information systems were compared for data qualification, the Mortality Information System (SIM) and the Hospital Information System (SIH). Pre-hospital mortality depends on burn etiology, with a relative risk of an out-of-hospital death from electrical burns compared to thermal burns of 1.59 (95 % CI: 1.55–1.63). Among all burn deaths, 76.2 % occurred in males, with a statistical significance for all age groups (p < 0.001). Regions with the lowest demographic density in the country had areas with high mortality, with a difference of mean from 2.21 inhab/Km 2 (median: 2.19) in municipalities with mortality ≥4/100,000inhab to 127 inhab/Km 2 (median 27.8) in municipalities with mortality <4/100,000inhab (p < 0.001). The association between mortality and the socioeconomic variables studied was exactly the opposite between thermal and electrical causes. A mean difference of 0.61 (95 % CI: 0.55–0.68) in in-hospital mortality due to general burns per 100,000 inhabitants was observed between the SIM database (mean: 0.64/100,000 inhabitants) and the SIH database (mean: 0.03/100,000 inhabitants; p < 0.001). Our findings demonstrate that studies related to burns must analyze thermal and electrical etiologies separately since they present different correlations with sociodemographic aspects. Also, SIH should not be used to estimate burn incidence or mortality, since it underreports data.