Blood Test Identifies Mortality Risk for Trauma Patients

A simple, inexpensive blood test performed on trauma patients upon admission can help doctors easily identify patients at greatest risk of death.

A computerized tool that combines factors like age, gender, and common blood tests known as the complete blood count (CBC) and the basic metabolic profile (BMP) can determine an individual's mortality risk is now available to physicians.

Scientists at the Intermountain Medical Center (Salt Lake City, UT, USA) studied 9,538 patients and discovered that some trauma patients are far more likely to die than others were, regardless of the severity of their original injuries. The Intermountain Risk Score is a computerized tool and has been helpful in evaluating individuals with medical problems like heart failure or chronic pulmonary disease. The benefit of the tool had not been tested for trauma patients hospitalized due to an accident or traumatic injury, rather than an underlying condition.

The Intermountain Medical Center used the tool to categorize patients according to high, moderate, and low risk levels. Some surprising findings emerged as high-risk men were nearly 58 times more likely to die within a year than low-risk men were. Men with a moderate risk were nearly 13 times more likely to die than those with low risk. High-risk women were 19 times more likely to die within a year than low-risk women were, and women with moderate risk were five times more likely to die than those with low risk.

Sarah Majercik, MD, an Intermountain Medical Center surgeon, said, "As surgeons, we don't often use all of the CBC results in evaluating a patient who needs surgery for a bleeding spleen or after a motor vehicle accident. There are certain values, such as hemoglobin, hematocrit, and platelets that we scrutinize closely as part of good clinical care, but then other parts, such as the red blood cell distribution width (RDW) that we pay no attention to at all in the acute setting. These factors are generally overlooked, even though they are part of the CBC that every trauma patient gets when he or she arrives in the emergency room." The study was presented on January 18, 2013, at the 27th annual Scientific Session of the Eastern Association for the Surgery of Trauma held in Phoenix (AZ, USA).

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