Abstract
Spinal cord injuries represent a special category of injuries in traumatic pathology, with high morbidity and mortality, which justify their analysis with the aim to identify useful aspects in order to prevent and treat them. We therefore performed a retrospective study on 426 cases in order to analyze epidemiology and medico-legal issues related to spinal cord injuries. The studied items regarded socio-demographic aspects (gender, age, home region), type of lesions (vertebral, spinal cord, association with other trauma), circumstances leading to trauma (cause of the injury, season), data regarding hospitalization (medical condition at the hospital admission, number of days of hospitalization, clinical diagnosis, imaging exploration level) and data resulting from autopsy (diagnosis, toxicological examination). Most of our results are consistent with literature data, except for some epidemiological items, which might be explained with cultural differences, life style and inhomogeneous population. Based on our results, the general conclusion is the need for prevention campaigns, focusing on road traffic accidents and falls (especially in elderly) as the main causes of spinal cord injuries.
Traumatic spinal cord injuries – epidemiologic and medico-legal issues
