Researchers find blood test predicts mortality in trauma patients

Researchers found that a simple blood test performed on trauma patients upon admission may help identify patients at greatest risk of death.

Sarah Majercik, MD, MBA, FACS, and colleagues used the Intermountain Risk Score that combines age, gender common blood count (CBC) and basic metabolic profile to determine a trauma patient’s risk for mortality.

“As surgeons, we don’t often use all of the CBC results in evaluating a patient who need surgery for a bleeding spleen or after a motor vehicle accident,” Majercik, a surgeon and trauma researcher at the Intermountain Medical Center in Salt Lake City, stated in a press release.

She added, “These are certain values, such as hemoglobin, hemacrit 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 every trauma patient gets when he or she arrives in the emergency room.”

Majercik and her team found that of 9,538 trauma patients studied during a 6-year period, high-risk men were nearly 58 times more likely to die with 1 year than low-risk men. Men at moderate risk under the score were at a 13 times higher risk of death than low-risk men, and high-risk women were at a 19 times higher risk of death than low-risk women within 1 year.

Reference:

Majercik S. Intermountain risk score is highly predictive of mortality in trauma patients. Presented at: Eastern Association for the Surgery of Trauma Annual Meeting; Jan. 15 – 19, 2013; Phoenix.