Can We Predict Mortality in Traffic Accidents in Emergency Department?

Year 2019, Volume: 1 Issue: 1, 1 - 6, 23.04.2019

Fatma Tortum , Atıf Bayramoğlu

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

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