Traumatic Spinal Cord Injuries Due to Motor Vehicle Accidents

Spine trauma is an important health problem. Traumatic spinal cord injury (SCI) due to motor vehicle accident (MVA) might have a different epidemiologic pattern in Guilan province of Iran owing to its geographical characteristics. Therefore, the present study was conducted to the study epidemiology of SCI injuries due to road accidents in a trauma referral center in Guilan.

In this cross-sectional study, we used data SCI registry of Poursina Hospital. All the patients with spine trauma, due to MVA, hospitalized in the trauma center of Poursina Hospital, Rasht, Guilan, Iran between March 2015 and March 2018 were studied.

A total of 127 patients with spine trauma due to MVA were reviewed. The mean±SD age of patients was 38.27±16.22 years. We observed that 93.7%, 1.6%, and 4.7% of the patients had initial Glasgow Comma Scale (GCS≥13, 9≤GCS≤12, and GCS<9, respectively). SCIs were found several anatomical regions including cervical (n=54, 42.5%), lumbar (n=39, 30.7%), thoracic (n=23, 18.1%), thoracic and lumbar (n=7, 5.5%), thoracic and cervical (n=3, 2.4%), and lumbar and cervical (n=1, 0.8%) regions. Evaluated by Glasgow Outcome Scale (GOS), good recovery, moderate disability, severe disability, vegetative state, and death were found in 114 (91.2%), 4 (3.1%), 4 (3.1%), 1 (0.8%), 2 (1.6%) of the patients, respectively. Two patients were discharged by their personal contest.

Spine trauma due to MVA is mostly seen in the young. SCI due to such trauma is mostly found in the cervical region. Good recovery was seen in most of the subjects.