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Background: The cardiovascular reflex responses to injury and simple hemorrhage are coordinated in the central nervous system. Coincidental brain injury, which is present in 64% of trauma patients who die, could impair these homeostatic responses. The occurrence of hemorrhagic shock in the patient with head injury is also known to increase mortality. Therefore, there is a potential bidirectional interaction between traumatic brain injury and peripheral injury, which would result in an increased mortality when these two injuries coexist. Our objective was to test the hypothesis that moderate traumatic brain injury is an independent predictor of outcome in patients with multisystem trauma., Methods: We carried out an analysis of the UK Trauma Audit and Research Network Database. Moderate traumatic brain injury was defined as an Abbreviated Injury Scale score of 3. The study population included 2,717 patients with multisystem injury: 378 patients had a moderate brain injury with peripheral injury, and 2,339 patients had extracranial injury alone. Mortality rates for both groups were compared at increasing injury severity., Results: Moderate brain injury alone was associated with a mortality rate of 4.2%. However, when combined with extracranial injury, the risk of death was double that attributable to extracranial injury alone (odds ratio, 2.08; 95% confidence interval, 1.57-2.77)., Conclusion: This study confirms that the coexistence of moderate traumatic brain injury with extracranial injury is associated with a doubling of the predicted mortality rate throughout the injury severity ranges studied.

Objective: To assess whether length of time on-scene in patients with major injury was associated with severity of injury or with abnormal on-scene physiology., Methods: A retrospective analysis of a convenience sample of patients in whom prehospital on-scene times were entered onto the regional major trauma database. On-scene times of patients were analysed to assess whether ultimate injury severity score or on scene physiology measurements affected times. This was undertaken by examining subgroups of patients with similar injury severity or physiological measurements by Wilcoxon-Mann-Whitney testing and comparing 95% confidence intervals of the mean on-scene times., Results: The mean on-scene time for 111 non-entrapped patients was 26 minutes (95% confidence interval 23.5 to 28.6). Patients with injury severity score of > 15, with a Glasgow coma scale of < 13, and with an abnormal pulse spent significantly less time on-scene than less severely injured or physiologically deranged patients., Conclusions: Paramedics have the ability to recognise patients with severe injury and reduce on-scene times. On-scene times were consistently long throughout all subgroups of major trauma patients.