Neurological complications in patients with hyponatremia at the Guasmo Sur General Hospital in the period 2020-2022

Abstract

Introduction: hyponatremia is a hydroelectrolyte alteration caused by serum sodium concentrations less than 135 mmol/L. Which leads to varied clinical symptoms, from mild to severe, even causing neurological complications and/or death, associated with an increase in morbidity and mortality and hospital stay. Objective: to describe the neurological complications in patients with hyponatremia at the General Hospital of Guasmo Sur in the period 2020 - 2022. Materials and methods: descriptive, observational, retrospective cross-sectional study. Patients with hyponatremia who presented with neurological complications during their stay at the study hospital were studied. Summary and dispersion measures were carried out for the analysis of quantitative variables, such as mean, median and mode, as well as variance and standard deviation. For the qualitative variables, he worked with frequency and percentage. Results: of 99 patients, the neurological sequelae that occurred were hemorrhages (n=99,22.0%), seizures (n=99, 53.5%), aphasia (n=99,45.5%), paralysis (n=99;22.2%), cognitive impairment (n=99.75.8%), coma (n=99.4%) and finally death (n=99.13.1%), i.e., that the most frequent neurological complication was cognitive impairment. The lower the value, the greater the number of hospital stays. On the other hand, diabetes mellitus debuts with more cases of cognitive impairment, which is the most frequent neurological complication found in our study. Conclusions: The most common manifestation of this hydroelectrolyte disorder is altered mental status, which can progress and produce cerebral edema, complicating it with cerebrovascular accidents, mainly affecting women and patients over 65 years of age.