Early Management after Acute Traumatic Spinal Cord Injury

Abstract

Trauma to the spine and spinal cord may result in neurological lesions. In mild cases the symptoms may be only transient, but severe trauma may reslut in permanent and complete disability, including tetra- or paraplegia, sensory deficits and autonomic dysfunction (1). Kraus (2) found that the reported incidence of spinal cord injury (SCI) ranged from 12.7 to 50 per million population per year. The incidence in Sweden is approximately 15 per million population per year. Young people are frequently afflicted. Eighty per cent of the injured patients are younger than 40 years of age and 50% are between 15 and 25 years old (2). The typical patient is a young male who has sustained the injury in a motor vehicle accident. During 1981, 50% of all deaths resulting from injury in the United States were caused by trauma to the central nervous system. Among these victims, lo%, or 3.3 per 100,000, died as a result of spinal cord injury (3).