Can We Predict Mortality in Traffic Accidents in Emergency Department?

Abstract

Introduction and Objective: Traffic accidents are one of the leading causes of mortality in young adults. Several physiological and biochemical parameters were defined for this purpose. Our objective was to investigate the correlation between mortality and the biochemical parameters, hemogram parameters and blood gas parameters.

Materials and Methods: 768 patients, who had applied to the emergency unit of the Atatürk University Research Hospital due to the traffic accident between 01.01.2017 and 01.07.2017, were retrospectively investigated. Two groups were formed from patients, who died (Group 1) and discharged (Group 2). The information about the patients and the biochemical parameters, hemogram parameters, blood gas analyses were retrieved from the electronic patient files and application files in the emergency department. Data were analyzed with SPSS  v20 software package. The accepted limit of significance was p<0.05.

Results:  42.2 % of patients were hospitalized and treated in the clinics and 1.4 % died. There was a significant difference between the groups regarding pH, lactate, HCO₃, SBC, PCO₂,  calcium and albumin levels. However, the differences in respect of hematocrit, platelet,WBC levels were insignificant (Table).

Discussion and Conclusion: An increase in the base deficit, which emerges due to the metabolic acidosis and lactic acidosis as a result of hypovolemia, was described in several studies focused on the patients injured in traffic accidents. Our study confirmed the findings in the literature and showed that the values of pH, HCO₃, SBC, SBE, calcium and albumin were lower in the patients, who died, compared to the discharged patients.

Keywords

• blood gas parameters,emergency department,mortality,traffic accident

References

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