[Effects on health of the L'Aquila (Central Italy) 2009 earthquake]

Abstract

Background: an earthquake of 6.3 magnitude struck the town and province of L'Aquila on 6th April 2009. About 100,000 buildings were damaged, 1,600 people remained injured and 309 deceased; 66,000 people were left homeless by the disaster. The studies performed on the consequences of this seismic event have been numerous, more than those published on the occasion of similar events in Italy.

Design, setting and participants: an electronic bibliographic research was conducted through Embase, MedLine, Current Contents, Web of Science, PsycINFO during a reference period from April 2009 to August 2015. All articles fulfilling keywords criteria of «L'Aquila» and/or «earthquake» were eventually selected. A further search was conducted on Google and Google Scholar and authors were contacted if necessary to obtain article copies. Finally, 56 papers were identified and grouped in areas of interest: studies in general population, clinical studies on psychiatric sample, studies on medical conditions, studies on suicidal behaviours, and studies human and animal behaviours.

Results: Twenty-three studies were conducted on general populations, 9 of whom on adolescent samples. All studies were done in convenience samples. Thirteen clinical studies were conducted in psychiatric samples and 16 in medical or paraphysiological conditions. Three studies were conducted in suicidal ideations and behaviours. One article is about human and animal behaviours. These studies show that different population groups were characterized by specific kinds of response to the trauma with different possible interactions of risk and protective factors.

Conclusions: from such observations it can be conceived that research on the evaluation and identification of the interventions have to change across years in order to meet the needs of the different subgroups of survivors.