Swarjith Nimmakayala*, Ashwani Kumar Chaudhary, Hanish Bansal, Shivender Sobti, Jagminder Singh and Saurabh Sharma
Traumatic spinal injuries comprise of either column fractures or spinal cord injuries or both. Spinal injury is one of the most devastating injuries having a great impact on patients, their families, and society. The major cause of injury in the developed world is due to motor vehicle accidents. Men are mostly affected during their early and late adulthood (3rd decade and 8th decade of life). The age distribution is bimodal. The highest prevalence of traumatic spine injury was seen in age group 15-45 years old, vertebral fractures occur due to force applied to spinal structures. It takes a relatively stronger force to cause a vertebral fracture in healthy bone tissue, but when a bone is weakened due to various causes, vertebral fractures can result from trivial trauma.
This study was conducted in the department of neurosurgery DMCH Ludhiana over a period of one year. About 43 patients of all age groups with spinal injuries were included in the study. Majority of patients in our study were male compared to female (79.1% versus 20.9% of patients) with male to female ratio of 2.7:1, the range of age of patients suffering spine trauma was 18 years to 87 years with mean age being 44.5 years. Majority of spine injuries were seen in students (32.5% of cases), aged less than 30 years. Most of the spine injuries occurred during winter season which accounted for 44.1% of cases, due to low visibility leading to high risk of road traffic accidents. Most common level of spine injury in our study was seen in cervical region (79% of cases) followed by thoracic region (9.3% of cases). The most common type of fracture was burst fracture (39.5% of cases) followed by subluxation fractures (32.5% of cases). In our study about 41.9% of patients underwent surgery and 58.9% of them were managed conservatively. In patients who were managed conservatively 61% of injuries were seen in cervical region. The mean duration of hospital stay was 17.62 days and standard deviation of 10.72. The most common associated injury was head injury in 9.3% of cases followed by chest and long bones injuries with 6.9% of cases each. Mortality rate in our study was 9.3% of cases and the patients who died had cervical spine injury and its complications.
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