ABSTRACT

We aimed to investigate the demographical features, clinical and laboratory findings, treatment, rates of mortality of patients above 16 years admitted to emergency department with isolated abdominal trauma and who contribute to our country’s literature.

This study involves 106 adult patients admitted to the emergency service of our hospital with isolated abdominal trauma between January 2005 and 2009. Data collected from files were loaded to the SPSS 15.0 computer programme. For continuous data in comparison of groups, Mann-Whitney U test; and for discontinuous data Chi-Square test was performed.

79% of abdominal trauma patients were male and median age was 31. The most frequent mechanism of injury was penetrating trauma. The most frequent etiology was motor vehicle accident. We determined that 76.4% of patients were admitted in the first 3 hours. The most common complaint was abdominal pain, and rebound was observed in 20.8% of cases. We observed that 22.6% of the patients were hypotensive and, of those hypotensive patients, 91.7% underwent surgery. 45.3% of cases had erythrocyte therapy replacement and those who had 2 units and more replacement requirement had a higher probability of undergoing surgery (p<0.05).

The main cause of abdominal trauma is motor vehicle accidents and a systolic blood pressure less than 90 mmHg increases the possibility of surgical treatment.

Keywords: Abdominal trauma, retrospective study, emergency service