Over the past two decades, there has been a massive swing from open repair of blunt thoracic aortic injury to thoracic endovascular aortic repair (TEVAR). Although technically a bit more complex, it has decreased both morbidity and mortality significantly. The usual push in fresh trauma patients is to take care of all the life-threatening injuries as soon as possible. And from the days of the open thoracic procedure, this was generally warranted.

However, the optimal timing of repair during the age of TEVAR is not as clear. Is it really necessary to go crashing into the angio or hybrid suite to get this taken care of? Or should it wait until the patient is not as physiologically damaged? The group at University of Texas at San Antonio looked at experience in the National Trauma Databank for some guidance. They reviewed four years of data from 2012 to 2015. Patients who arrested in or prior to arrival in the ED were excluded. Mortality was the primary outcome of interest, but complications and hospital length of stay (LOS) was also noted.

Here are the factoids:

• Nearly 6,000 patients with blunt thoracic aortic injury were identifed, and 1,930 (33%) underwent TEVAR, 2% were opened, and 65% were managed nonoperatively
• Looking only at TEVAR patients, 69% underwent the procedure within 24 hours, 24% after 24 hours, and the remainder were not recorded (!)
• Mortality was significantly higher in the early TEVAR group (6.4% vs 2.1%)
• Hospital LOS was significantly shorter in the early TEVAR group (18 vs 22 days)
• Logistic regression controlling for hypotension, severe TBI, ISS and older age confirmed the significantly lower mortality in the delayed group

The authors concluded that delayed (>24 hrs) TEVAR was associated with decreased mortality but longer length of stay.

This is a nice, clean abstract to read. The hypothesis and results are easy to understand and make sense. And it’s exactly the kind of poster that makes you think a bit. 

The only real downside is that it is an NTDB study, so there is very limited ability to go back and tease out why these results should be true. These results should push the authors to set up a more prospective study so they can figure out why this should be true. We can certainly speculate that it helps to temporize with good blood pressure control while cleaning up other major injuries and correcting deranged physiology. But one never knows until the right study is actually done.

Here are my questions for the presenter and authors:

• Were you able to glean any insights into the associations you identified from the other data in the NTDB records you used? This could help design a really good study to see if your impressions are true.
• The fact that a quarter of patients had TEVAR at an unknown time throws a big monkey wrench in your results. Can you use any statistical tricks to see if assuming they were either early or late would influence your results. Is it possible that this unknown group could completely neutralized your study?

I’m very excited by this one, and I don’t normally get too excited by posters. Great work!

Reference: Timing of repair of blunt traumatic thoracic aortic injury: results from the National Trauma Databank. AAST 2019, Poster #5.