An Epidemiologic Study of Traffic Accidents and Factors Affecting their Outcome in Admitted Patients due to Crashes in the Southern Trauma Center

Due to the high number of road traffic accidents in Iran and the significant rate of death and adverse complications caused by these accidents, it seems necessary to investigate the related factors. The aim of this study was to investigate the epidemiological characteristics of traffic accidents and the factors affecting the death of hospitalized patients due to accidents.

In this study, injured patients due to traffic accidents referring to the trauma hospital in Shiraz were randomly entered into the study for 6 months. The factors affecting the occurrence of an accident including the risk factors before the accident, during the incident, and at the time of hospitalization were investigated in the patient's mortality rate. A multivariable logistic regression was used to investigate the effect of factors on the patients’ chances of death.

In this study, 563 injured patients from traumatic accidents admitted to the recovery unit for a period of 6 months were investigated. Injuries and death in the first eight hours of admission are significantly higher than other hours. The results show that damage to the age group of 15-39 years, Glasgow coma score, injury severity score, trauma injury severity score, revised trauma score, head and neck injury score, and the history of having a surgery significantly increase the chance of death.   Among the areas of injury, having head and neck injuries as well as abdomen injury makes the chance of death 3.36 and 6.62 fold, respectively.

It is necessary to observe safety rules for drivers and passengers of the car more than before.  Also, patients   referring to trauma centers should be prioritized and treated based on the existing classification criteria and the risk assessment of death according to prognostic factors.