BACKGROUND Navajo motor vehicle mortality is the highest among the 12 Indian Health Service (IHS) administrative areas. In July 1988, the Navajo Nation enacted a primary enforcement safety belt use and a child restraint law. OBJECTIVE Assess the impact of the laws on the rate and severity of pediatric (0-19 years) motor vehicle injury resulting in hospitalizations in the Navajo Nation. METH...

STUDY DESIGN Retrospective. OBJECTIVE With approximately 10,000 new spinal cord injury (SCI) patients in the United States each year, predicting public health outcomes is an important public health concern. Combining all regions of the spine in SCI trials may be misleading if the lumbar and sacral regions (conus) have a neurologic improvement at different rates than the thoracic or thoracolum...

BACKGROUND The ability of an organism to withstand trauma is determined by the injury per se and inherent properties of the organism at the time of injury. We analyzed whether pre-injury morbidity scored on a four-level ordinal scale according to the American Society of Anesthesiologists Physical Status (ASA-PS) classification system predicts mortality after trauma. MATERIALS From a total of ...

BACKGROUND Blunt cardiac injury is a rare trauma entity. Here, we sought to evaluate the relevance and prognostic significance of blunt cardiac injury in severely injured patients. METHODS In a retrospective multicentre study, using data collected from 47,580 patients enrolled to TraumaRegister DGU (1993-2009), characteristics of trauma, prehospital / hospital trauma management, and outcome a...

OBJECTIVE To measure interobserver variation in recording injury from case notes and its effect on calculating injury severity scores (ISS) from identical data and predicting probabilities of survival by using the combined trauma and injury severity score (TRISS). DESIGN Observer variation study using injury severity scoring and subsequent calculation of probability of survival based on combi...

BACKGROUND Helicopters have become a major part of the modern trauma care system and are frequently used to transport patients from the scene of their injury to a trauma center. While early studies reported decreased mortality for trauma patients transported by helicopters when compared with those transported by ground ambulances, more recent research has questioned the benefit of helicopter tr...

BACKGROUND Administrative or quality improvement registries may or may not contain the elements needed for investigations by trauma researchers. International Classification of Diseases Program for Injury Categorisation (ICDPIC), a statistical program available through Stata, is a powerful tool that can extract injury severity scores from ICD-9-CM codes. We conducted a validation study for use ...

In 139 patients with burst fractures of the thoracic, thoracolumbar or lumbar spine, the least sagittal diameter of the spinal canal at the level of injury was measured by computerised tomography. By multiple logistic regression we investigated the joint correlation of the level of the burst fracture and the percentage of spinal canal stenosis with the probability of an associated neurological ...