The incidence of organ dysfunction and failure in trauma patients

Introduction

Trauma patients have a high mortality and more often develop organ failure with worse outcome.

Objective

To study the incidence of organ dysfunction and failure, and the impact on mortality in patients who were admitted to an ICU with multiple trauma.

Materials and methods

We studied patients consecutively admitted to a trauma ICU from 1 January 2001 to 31 December 2003. The Sequential Organ Failure Assessment score at admission was measured; we considered points 1 and 2 of the score as dysfunction and points 3 and 4 as failure.

Results

A total of 802 patients were studied; the mortality of the general population without organ dysfunction was 39.65%. The incidence of organ dysfunction and failure, with the correspondent mortality, is illustrated in Table 1.

Table 1 Incidence of organ dysfunction and failure in major trauma

Conclusion

The presence of organ dysfunction worsened the outcome of patients with multiple trauma; the respiratory dysfunction is more prevalent than others but with a lower impact on mortality, followed by coagulation and liver dysfunction. The presence of coagulation, respiratory failure and cardiovascular failure is associated with higher mortality than liver or renal failure.