Incidence of Acute Care Complications in Vertebral Column Fracture Patients With and Without Spinal Cord Injury

Incidence, impact, and risk factors of adverse events in thoracic and lumbar spine fractures: an ambispective cohort analysis of 390 patients

“…Other centers within the zone will treat isolated thoracic or lumbar spine trauma both operatively and nonoperatively, but no other regional center treats SCI. Most studies report a lower incidence of SCI with thoracic and lumbar traumas between 10% and 25%, whereas we report a rate of 36% among our patient groups [16,17].…”

“…Larger trials have reported a 10% to 25% incidence of neurologic deficit [16,17]. The majority of these patients will be treated operatively because of ongoing compression of the neural elements, residual instability, and malalignment of the spinal column.…”

Risk Factors for Organ Dysfunction and Failure in Patients with Acute Traumatic Cervical Spinal Cord Injury

“…Respiratory dysfunction is the most widely reported complication following cervical SCI in the literature [36][37][38][39][40]. Following cervical SCI, respiratory compromise occurs as a result of primary ventilatory insufficiency from denervation which results in diaphragmatic and chest wall dysfunction as well as impaired cough [39,40].…”

“…Following cervical SCI, respiratory compromise occurs as a result of primary ventilatory insufficiency from denervation which results in diaphragmatic and chest wall dysfunction as well as impaired cough [39,40]. Respiratory function is further compromised by high rates of pneumonia, atelectasis, and pulmonary embolism [34,36,37,39,41]. Respiratory ''complications'' have been reported to occur in as few as 23% to as many as 80% of patients with acute traumatic cervical SCI [34,36,[41][42][43][44].…”

“…This indicates that respiratory dysfunction and failure are progressive and tend to worsen after the primary injury. Cardiovascular dysfunction has also been described following acute traumatic cervical SCI with rates reported to be between 11 and 31% [35,36,45,46]. The cardiovascular dysfunction in patients with acute cervical SCI stems from a number of causes but is clearly compounded by the loss of supraspinal control of the sympathetic nervous system [47,48].…”