Tag Archives: dogma

Philosophy

Use Of Radio-opaque Markers In Penetrating Trauma

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As I was browsing through my journal list this week, I ran into an interesting title for an article that is currently in press.

“The use of radio-opaque markers is medical dogma”

Catchy, especially since I love writing about dogma vs what is really supported by the literature. The author questions the justification of this practice and posits that there are risks to extrapolating information based on radiographs with markers placed by the trauma team.

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The author first reviewed the literature on the use of markers for penetrating injury, which started only recently, in 2002. Markers were initially used to precisely locate the penetration site since skin wounds (obviously) don’t show up on X-rays. Typically, these were just plain old paper clips. Some trauma professionals placed them directly over the wound. Others un-bent them and fashioned them into shapes that pointed to the exact location of the wound.

With the growing usage of CT scans to evaluate stable patients, modifications to the marker were made. Small arrow markers designed for use on x-rays were frequently used. However, even the very small ones could cause enough scatter on a CT scan to interfere with diagnosis. At some centers, Vitamin E capsules were taped on top of the wound. But thankfully, there are now special markers that can pinpoint the wound without degrading the tomographic image.

The author goes on to describe how gunshot wounds specifically are difficult to assess with a marker. Although the exact surface location may be noted, the underlying injuries vary due to size, distance, velocity, and trajectory change from tissue density or bone strikes. He also notes that it may not be wise to place a marker into a bloody field in a potentially combative patients.

The article concludes that the use of this technique for identifying anything other than surface location of penetrations lacks clinical evidence and is based only on expert opinion. Which essentially makes it dogma.

Bottom line: Here are my thoughts. First, the use of markers on penetrating wounds has been going on for much longer than the 20 years found in the trauma literature reviewed here. It has been a common practice among trauma surgeons for many, many decades. Most “seasoned” (old) trauma surgeons have been doing and teaching this for their entire careers. 

I concur that we have techniques like CT scan available to us now that provide an excellent view of the penetration trajectory. The skin wound is usually apparent on the scan, but may be improved with the use of a CT-approved marker.

So why still do this for the patient arriving in your trauma bay? An experienced trauma surgeon can get a good sense of the trajectory based on the entry point, the exit wound, and the location of any retained bullet or fragments. Rapid placement of some kind of marker on all wounds followed by a quick image allows them to roughly predict what was hit, and assess the possibility that there might be bleeding that would drive the team straight to the operating room. It can help direct the surgical exploration if imaging was unnecessary or contraindicated. 

So yes, this is dogma. The reality is that no one will ever be able to design a study that definitively evaluates the very soft outcomes that result from using this technique. But every senior trauma surgeon can easily cite numerous examples in their career when this method has been extremely useful. The lack of a study only means that there will never be any evidence-based guideline for the use of this technique. However, it is still acceptable to have a protocol based on substantial clinical experience. But as with all dogma, once that definitive study finally does comes along, the protocol must be modified to adhere to the findings of the study.

For now, keep using those markers! And I’m very interested in comments from both old and young trauma professionals on this topic.

Reference: The Use of Radio-opaque Markers is Medical Dogma, doi:10.1111/acem.1485, Dec 2023.

Head

Is Intubation For Low GCS Necessary? Dangerous?

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More dogma? I was taught that as the Glasgow Coma Scale (GCS) score drops toward 8, the higher the consideration of intubating the patient. And that a GCS 8 was pretty much an absolute indication for inserting the endotracheal tube. The rationale was that the more obtunded the patient was, the less able they were to protect their airway.

Even ATLS, our trauma textbooks, and practice guidelines from the likes of EAST recommend intubation for GCS 8 and less.

Having said that, I know many of you have been in a situation where you have a patient with GCS 8 or so, and they are lying there breathing peacefully with good oxygenation and ventilation. Do you really need to put in that tube? And we also tend to be very forgiving with obtunded children, avoiding premature intubation there as well.

Intubation is not a benign procedure. There is the potential for mayhem during the process, ICU admission will be required, and a host of ventilator and sedation-related complications are possible once the patient arrives there.

The trauma group at LAC + USC decided to look into this. They performed a five-year retrospective study of data from the TQIP database. A subset of patients was selected with isolated blunt head injury and GCS 7-8 who did not require immediate operation upon arrival. They were divided into intubation and non-intubation groups, and these were further subdivided into intubation within an hour of arrival, intubation after an hour, and never intubated groups.

Here are the factoids:

  • A total of 2,727 patients were studied; about two thirds were intubated within an hour, a quarter were never intubated, and the remaining 9% were intubated after the first hour
  • Immediately intubated patients were significantly younger and had fewer comorbidities
  • Mortality was 19% in the immediate intubation group vs 27% in the delayed group vs 11% in the never intubated group
  • Complications were significantly higher after immediate intubation, particularly DVT and ventilator associated pneumonia (VAP)
  • Regression analysis indicated that immediate intubation was independently associated with mortality compared to late or never intubated patients
  • Using additional regression testing, the authors concluded that the following two subsets of patients would benefit most from early intubation:
    • Younger patients (age < 45) with head AIS 5
    • Patients age <65 with head AIS 5

The authors recommend that “future research focus on more adequate parameters to identify patients requiring immediate intubation and should avoid an isolated fixed GCS threshold.”

Bottom line: This is a difficult paper to understand (at least for me). It looks like the authors are saying we should avoid immediate intubation of severe TBI patients with depressed GCS to reduce mortality and complications.

But you need to read the whole paper closely to really get it. First, let’s look at those mortality figures. The mortality in the three groups was:

  • intubated < 1 hour after arrival – 18.7% (from n = 1,866)
  • intubated > 1 hour after arrival – 27.4% (from n = 223)
  • never intubated – 11.4% (from n = 638)
  • If you combine the last two lines you get the mortality in the non-immediate intubations = 15.5% (from n = 861)

The authors then claim that the mortality for immediate intubation is greater than non-immediate intubation (the other two groups). This may be somewhat misleading, because the delayed intubation group actually has a higher mortality than the immediate group (27%)! This fact is covered up by combining delayed intubation with the never intubated group, bringing the number down to 15.5%!! Why shouldn’t you say that intubating the patient at any time is bad, immediate or delayed??

They suggest some criteria to try to focus in on the patients who really need intubation: younger patients (age < 45 or < 65) with head AIS 5 and GCS 7. Unfortunately, you can’t determine which patients have an AIS 5 in their head without a head CT, which may push them into the higher mortality delayed intubation group.

Remember, this type of study can only show an association, not cause and effect. The authors suggest that early intubation results in more deaths and complications. My suspicion is that patients with severe TBI don’t do poorly because they were intubated. I believe that they were intubated because the clinicians feared that they would do poorly. Unfortunately, this is information that can only be gleaned from a prospective study, not a retrospective database review.  And no amount of statistical manipulation or regression analysis can make up for this shortcoming.

This is yet another one of those studies that ends by concluding that a better study should be done. That would be okay if this one actually provided a hint that the endeavor would be worthwhile. But it doesn’t. I didn’t really learn anything from it, unfortunately.

So I still heartily recommend using your existing training, guidelines, and judgement to intubate these patients early and safely!

Reference: Isolated traumatic brain injury: Routine intubation for GCS 7 or 8 may be harmful! J Trauma, publish ahead of print, DOI: 10.1097/TA.0000000000003123, Feb 16, 2021.

Imaging

Is The Trauma Bay Chest X-Ray Really Necessary Or Just Dogma?

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I love challenging dogma. I spoke last week (virtually) at an excellent event at the Intermountain Medical Center in Utah. One of my talks there addressed trauma myths and dogma.

I bring this up because there is an interesting article in the Journal of Trauma this month that questions the necessity of the routine chest x-ray (CXR) in blunt trauma resuscitation. So of course, this caught my eye. Let’s dig in.

The first thing to understand is that this article is an opinion piece and is identified as such. It was written by three surgeons, including the trauma medical director, at the Stanford University Hospital trauma center.

First, what are we really looking for on the chest x-ray that is taken in the trauma bay? I call them “the three big things”.

  • Big air. The first item to be identified is a pneumothorax. The chest x-ray helps the trauma professionals decide if the pneumo needs an intervention (chest tube) and when. (Note: it could in theory identify a tension pneumothorax. But in that case, the trauma pros should be embarrassed. They should have picked that up on their clinical exam and assessment of the vitals.)
  • Big blood. The chest x-ray can also identify a hemothorax. And once again, it can help decide whether its size warrants chest tube insertion.
  • Big mediastinum. A wide mediastinum may indicate the presence of hematoma from an aortic injury. It is one of the indications for performing CT angiography of the chest to rule it out.

Here are their authors’ arguments:

  • There are other imaging modalities available to us that are very accurate. FAST ultrasound has been used routinely for abdominal and cardiac evaluation for over a decade. The extended FAST (eFAST) involves evaluation of the pleural interface to identify pneumothorax. A study published last year pitted CXR vs eFAST. It found that the eFAST outperformed with a sensitivity of 94% and specificity of nearly 100%.
    But what about hemothorax? Ultrasound is less helpful here. But the CT scanner is. It is far more accurate at identifying and quantifying hemothorax than the CXR.
  • Evaluation of the aorta can either wait, or it can’t wait at all. If the patient loses vital signs in the trauma bay the decision to open the chest or insert a REBOA catheter must be made. In the latter case, a chest x-ray must be obtained to exclude a thoracic source of bleeding that the cathether is of no use for. But if the patient truly is bleeding out from a blunt aortic injury, it is nearly certain that he or she is not leaving the trauma bay alive.
    What about using the wide mediastinum as an indication or order the chest CT angiogram? The authors argue that there will probably be a history of deceleration or other associated injuries (femur fracture is a very common one).

Bottom line: The authors argue that the chest x-ray should go the way of the lateral cervical spine x-ray used at the turn of the 21st century and before. They claim that judicious use of the extended FAST and CT angiography can identify the significant injuries we need to know about in a timely manner.

My own opinion is more nuanced. I buy their arguments that the extended FAST will identify all significant pneumothoraces. However, we have typically answered the question “how big is too big” using the chest x-ray. That is the most helpful tool in deciding whether a chest tube is warranted or not.

As for hemothorax, I don’t believe that a CT is the best tool for evaluating this, either. Are the authors members of the “pan-scan” school? What about those of us that use the “selective scan” philosophy. True, the abdominal scan will identify both hemothorax and pneumthorax on the lower cuts of the chest. But as in the previous paragraph, we are better trained to judge when a chest tube is indicated by the appearance of the chest x-ray. Hemothorax (or pneumothorax) is not an indication to get a chest CT.

I don’t buy argument that there will be other indications of potential aortic injury. Deceleration is in the eye of the beholder. How do we know how fast the vehicle was actually moving? What is the magic velocity that will break this patient’s aorta? This particular patient may not have any of the other potential indicators that increase suspicion for aortic injury. That wide mediastinum may be the only clue. Yes, the numbers of affected patients are small, but the consequences of missing one could be deadly.

And what about patients who might not get scanned at all? And those who need a study to confirm tube or line placement? They must absolutely get a chest x-ray before they leave the trauma bay.

At this point, I can’t see a way to dispense with the chest x-ray completely. It should still be used to:

  • Confirm pneumothorax from eFAST to help decide if a chest tube is needed
  • Identify potential pathology (hemothorax, wide mediastinum) in patients who don’t otherwise meet criteria for chest CT
  • Verify endotracheal tube position after intubation

What do you think? Please leave your comments or Tweets about this topic.

References:

  • Extended-FAST plus MDCT in pneumothorax diagnosis of major trauma: time to revisit ATLS imaging approach? J Ultrasound. 2019;22(4):461–469.
  • Necessity of routine chest radiograph in blunt trauma resuscitation: Time to evaluate dogma with evidence. J Trauma 2020;89(3):e69-70.
General

Bowel Sounds, Or Just Plain BS?

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“Bowel sounds are normal”

How often do you see this on an H&P? Probably a lot more often than they are actually listened for, I would wager. But what do they really mean? Are they important to trauma professionals?

(Un)fortunately, there’s not a whole lot of research that’s looked at this mundane item. And pretty much all of it deals with surgical pathology (e.g. SBO) or the state of the postop abdomen. Over the years, papers have been published about the basics, and I will summarize them below:

  • Where to listen? Traditionally, auscultation is carried out in all four abdominal quadrants. However, sound transmission is such that listening centrally is usually sufficient.
  • Listen before palpation? Some papers suggest that palpation may stimulate peristalsis, so you should listen first.
  • How long should you listen? Reports vary from 30 seconds to 7 minutes (!). 
  • Significance? This is the big question. We’re not expecting to find hyperactive or high pitched sounds suggestive of surgical pathology here. Really, we’re just looking for sounds or no sounds.

But does it make a difference whether we hear anything or not?

Bottom line: In trauma, we don’t care about BS! We’ve all had patients with minimal injury and no bowel sounds, as well as patients with severe abdominal injury and normal ones. We certainly don’t have time to spend several minutes listening for something that has no bearing on our clinical assessment of the patient. Skip this unnecessary part of the physical exam, and continue on with your real evaluation!

Reference: A critical review of auscultating bowel sounds. Br J Nursing 18(18):1125-1129, 2009.

General

Bowel Sounds, Or Just Plain BS?

Leave a comment

“Bowel sounds are normal”

How often do you see this on an H&P? Probably a lot more often than they are actually listened for, I would wager. But what do they really mean? Are they important to trauma professionals?

(Un)fortunately, there’s not a whole lot of research that’s looked at this mundane item. And pretty much all of it deals with surgical pathology (e.g. SBO) or the state of the postop abdomen. Over the years, papers have been published about the basics, and I will summarize them below:

  • Where to listen? Traditionally, auscultation is carried out in all four abdominal quadrants. However, sound transmission is such that listening centrally is usually sufficient.
  • Listen before palpation? Some papers suggest that palpation may stimulate peristalsis, so you should listen first.
  • How long should you listen? Reports vary from 30 seconds to 7 minutes (!). 
  • Significance? This is the big question. We’re not expecting to find hyperactive or high pitched sounds suggestive of surgical pathology here. Really, we’re just looking for sounds or no sounds.

But does it make a difference whether we hear anything or not?

Bottom line: In trauma, we don’t care about BS! We’ve all had patients with minimal injury and no bowel sounds, as well as patients with severe abdominal injury and normal ones. We certainly don’t have time to spend several minutes listening for something that has no bearing on our clinical assessment of the patient. Skip this unnecessary part of the physical exam, and continue on with your real evaluation!

Reference: A critical review of auscultating bowel sounds. Br J Nursing 18(18):1125-1129, 2009.