Geriatric High-Energy Traumas Doubled in 10 Years?!
Things aren’t looking so good for the elderly, says new work from the University of Alabama, Yale University, and the University of Arizona. The study, “Ten-Year Incidence of High-Energy Geriatric Trauma at a Level 1 Trauma Center,” appears in the March 18, 2018 edition of the Journal of Orthopaedic Trauma.
Jeffrey M. Pearson, M.D. is with the University of Alabama’s Department of Orthopaedic Surgery. Dr. Pearson, a co-author on the study, told OTW, “This topic interested us because of the sheer volume of trauma patients we were seeing at our institution. We felt we needed to report on the increase in volume we were seeing in this patient population. Our volume of patients based on our institution’s catchment area allowed us to give an accurate assessment of the trends we reported on in this study.”
The authors wrote, “Demographic, injury, and clinical characteristics were compared between 34,017 patients with geriatric and nongeriatric high-energy trauma from 2005 to 2014…Patients with geriatric high-energy trauma nearly doubled from the study period of 2005-2014 to previous 10 years. Compared with patients with nongeriatric trauma, geriatric high-energy traumas were twice as likely to be due to a fall from height, had higher Injury Severity Scores, fewer abdominal injuries, and have head trauma…”
Dr. Pearson told OTW, “High energy geriatric trauma is on the rise. We have shown that these patients have worse outcomes as well compared to their younger counterparts. It might be beneficial for institutions to start a protocol for high energy geriatric trauma similar to a protocol for fragility fractures. These patients are predisposed to poor outcomes and it is incumbent upon us to do as much as we can to limit their poor outcomes.”
“This is simply an epidemiologic study and more work needs to be done to better elucidate protocols to improve the outcome of these patients.”
