Tag Archives: TBI

General

Trauma 20 Years Ago: Seatbelt Injuries

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Seatbelt use has increased from 58% in 1994 to a high of 85% last year. We know that seatbelt use saves lives, but trauma professionals are also aware that they can create their own injuries as well. This is a positive trade-off, because belt use prevents injuries that are difficult to treat (e.g. severe brain injury) and produces a higher number of intra-abdominal injuries that are easy to treat.

The spectrum of injuries attributed to seat belt use was finally appreciated in a journal article published 20 years ago this month. The authors wanted to catalog the various injuries seen in belted and unbelted motor vehicle occupants. They reviewed data from the North Carolina Trauma Registry, one of the most sophisticated state registries at the time. Although there were over 21,000 records in the database, only 3,901 involved motor vehicle crashes and had complete data on seatbelt use.

This study found the following:

  • Mortality was higher in those not wearing their seat belts (7% vs 3.2%)
  • Unbelted had a much higher incidence of severe head injury (50% vs 33%)
  • Overall incidence of any abdominal injury was the same for both (14%)
  • GI tract injuries were more common in the belted group (3.4% vs 1.8%)
  • Solid organ injury was the same

Bottom line: This study sparked the recognition that seatbelts reduce severe head injury but increase the incidence of some hollow viscus injuries. About 514 severe head injuries were prevented in exchange for 21 additional abdominal injuries that were generally easily repaired. Good tradeoff!

Related posts: 

Reference: The spectrum of abdominal injuries associates with the use of seat belts. J Trauma 31(6):821-826, 1991.

General, Technology
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Concussion Testing: There’s An App For That!

Smart phone programmers are becoming more and more creative! The newest trauma app is geared toward helping the user identify individuals who have suffered a concussion. It can be used by parents, coaches or physicians to help identify a concussion at sporting events.

The app is a portable and convenient system for identifying concussions based on established sports medicine research. It queries the user for common signs of concussion, tallies the results of a simple balance test, and looks for other symptoms that suggestion the injury. The exam can also be administered serially to detect changes from baseline.

To get the most from this free app, the user must purchase an optional module for $4.99 that does a more in-depth physiologic and cognitive evaluation. A report can be emailed automatically to your physician, and he or she can then respond and send a message to your team to approve or deny continuing play.

The app is provided by SportSafety Labs LLC. The basic app is free, and the add-on is $4.99. It is published for the iPhone and iPad.

Bottom line: Expect more trauma-oriented apps geared toward a variety of problems in the near future!

To get more information on this app, click here.

Pharmacy

Medication Alert! Dabigatran and Head Trauma

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First, there was warfarin, a cheap and effective way of treating deep venous thrombosis (DVT) and pulmonary embolism (PE) in trauma patients. Unfortunately, there is plenty of literature that shows the added risk that this drug poses in injured patients, particularly in head injury. Because of this, many trauma centers have developed “rapid reversal protocols” to quickly restore vitamin K dependent clotting factors in an attempt to improve outcomes. To see our protocol, click here.

Next came clopidogrel (Plavix), which is used to prevent clotting in vascular disease. It irreversibly inhibits platelet aggregation. Counteracting this drug is more complicated due to its long half-life. Platelet infusions are required, but the infused platelets are inhibited by any remaining drug in the plasma. This requires the use of lots of platelets to get some meaningful clot to form again.

Now, we have direct thrombin inhibitors (DTI). Hirudins were the first used, and were never an issue in trauma patients. And their short half-lives obviate the need for reversal. The newest DTIs (argatroban and dabigatran) are a real problem in trauma. Argatroban is not a problem, because it is given by IV only. But dabigatran (Pradaxa) has just been approved for oral use within the last year.

According to the package insert, “there is no antidote to dabigatran etexilate or dabigatran.” And also “dabigatran can be dialyzed (protein binding is low), with the removal of about 60% of drug over 2 to 3 hours; however, data supporting this approach are limited.”

We will be seeing patients taking this drug in the near future. What do we do if they are trauma victims with bleeding in critical places, like the brain? At Regions, we have developed a proposed guideline that combines oral charcoal, dialysis, transfusions and optionally, activated Factor VII. Click here to download the protocol.

If anyone has any experience with these patients, please comment below. And everyone else, keep your fingers crossed!

Related posts:

Protocols:

Thanks to Colleen Morton MD for developing the dabigatran reversal protocol

General

IOM Report: Nutrition and Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI)

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The Institute of Medicine (IOM) released a report last week summarizing a project that examined the impact of nutrition on head injury. The Department of Defense requested this review because of the significant morbidity and mortality incurred by our armed forces caused by TBI.

The IOM convened a panel of experts that reviewed the available data. As with most such panels, there is a recommendation to engage in additional research. They went a step further, though, and recommended several specific avenues of research, including:

  • Determine optimum levels of blood glucose
  • Study the benefits of insulin therapy
  • Determine the optimal goals for nutrition
  • Look at the effects of supplements and various diets, CDP-choline, creatine, n-3 fatty acids, fish oil and zinc supplements

The most pressing recommendation they made was a call to standardize the feeding regimen for severe TBI patients very early after injury. Specifically, they recommend that nutritional support be started within 24 hours of injury, consisting of 50-100% of the total energy expenditure with 1 to 1.5 g protein per kg body weight. This should be continued for the first 2 weeks after injury. It appears that this intervention limits the intensity of the inflammatory response after TBI and improves outcomes. 

Reference: Nutrition and Traumatic Brain Injury: Improving Acute and Subacute Health Outcomes in Military Personnel. Click to access the document on the IOM site.

General

Controlling Fever In Head Injury

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Fever is a well recognized side effect of head injury. Management of fever is inconsistent among physicians taking care of these patients. There is a lot of debate on the best course of action, but not so much data. Current enthusiasm for applications of hypothermia has created some reluctance to tolerate much in the way of hyperthermia. Here is my take on the currently available literature.

First, understand that there is a fundamental difference between studies that study induced hyperthermia vs those that look at spontaneous fever. This lies in the fact that the set point for temperature regulation is changed in fever, but not in hyperthermia. Therefore, it is not clear whether hyperthermia studies can truly be used to answer these questions.

Animal studies originally focused on stroke models, which showed deleterious effects from hyperthermia. TBI is very different than stroke, but some hyperthermia models did tend to show cellular damage and blood brain barrier breakdown at temperatures of 39C. However, a fever model in rats showed no outcome difference (in rats) in febrile vs normothermic animals with TBI.

A Medline search (ref 4) yielded no randomized controlled trials that could be used to guide us with regard to fever management. The lesser quality papers involved a very heterogeneous group of subjects that made it difficult to draw good conclusions. As a generalization, they found that extremes of temperature, both high and low, were probably associated with worse outcomes. One randomized prospective study showed that aggressive fever control for temperatures > 38.5C had higher mortality and more infections.

A recent meta-analysis (ref 3) found that TBI patients with fever stayed in the hospital and ICU longer. This translated into an extra $14,000 per patient. Precise reasons for the longer stay cannot be accurately determined, but it might be expected that patients with fever would undergo time-consuming searches for possible infectious sources.

Finally, a very recent prospective study (ref 1) at a single institution that did not try to alter temperature found that the optimum survival occurred in a group of patients whose temperatures remained between 36.5 and 38C.

Bottom line: Literature support for aggressive management of fever is poor. If there were a clear correlation with temperature maintained at or slightly below normal, we’d probably have figured it by now. Fever up to 38 degrees C probably does not need to be treated in head injured patients. However, this does not eliminate the need to continue surveillance for infectious complications.

References:

  1. The effect of spontaneuous alterations in brain temperature on outcome: a prospective observational cohort study in patients with severe traumatic brain injury. J Neurotrauma 27(12):2157-2164, 2010.
  2. Induced normothermia attenuates intracranial hypertension and reduces fever burden after severe traumatic brain injury. Neurocrit Care 11(1):82-87, 2009.
  3. Brain injury and fever: hospital length of stay and cost outcomes. J Intensive Care Med 24(2):131-139, 2009.
  4. The significance of altered temperature after traumatic brain injury: an analysis of investigations in experimental and human studies: part 2. Br J Neurosurg 22(4):497-507, 2008.