Spinal cord injury in pediatric age in Spain. Reality of a national reference center

Abstract

The findings of this study contribute to the knowledge regarding the situation of children with SCI in Spain. The incidence of pediatric SCI is very low; however, the provision of care remains a personal and social challenge.

Epidemiology of traumatic spinal cord injury in childhood and adolescence in Galicia, Spain: report of the last 26-years.

“…However, our figures differ from those reported in other studies involving the pediatric population (Table 3), in which the percentage of complete spinal cord injuries was higher. 9,10 Nevertheless, this value could have been influenced by the high mean age of our group of patients, in such a way that if we had only analyzed patients aged ≤ 10 years, this percentage would have increased to 77.8%, which is similar to the incidence reported in other case series of pediatric tSCI.…”

“…7 Compared with other studies, our case series revealed an even higher incidence rate in the adolescent age group, with 75% of our study sample being comprised by teenage patients between the ages of 15 and 17. [8][9][10] In terms of sex, male patients seemed to prevail over female ones both in our study and in those reviewed as references (Table 3). In fact, the percentage of male patients in our sample was much higher than that reported by other authors.…”

“…4 In our study, only 33.3% of the patients aged ≤ 10 years had quadriplegia, although this percentage increased to 37.3% in patients over the age of 10, thus proving the existence of a directly proportional relationship between the injury and the patients' age, as reported in other studies. [8][9][10] We could not find a clear prevalence in the available literature in terms of the level of the injury. Although the incidence of lumbar injuries is always lower, the percentage of thoracic and cervical injuries varies significantly, one injury being more prevalent than the other depending on the case series analyzed.…”