Abstract
Objectives
To determine (1) the prevalence of chronic physical health conditions reported preinjury,
at the time of injury, up to 1 year postinjury, and 1 to 5 years postinjury; and (2)
the risk of chronic physical health conditions reported 1 to 5 years postinjury in
people with orthopedic and other types of major trauma.
Design
Cohort study using linked trauma registry and health administrative datasets.
Setting
This study used linked data from the Victorian State Trauma Registry (VSTR), the Victorian
Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages (BDM), the Victorian Admitted Episodes Dataset
(VAED), and the Victorian Emergency Minimum Dataset (VEMD).
Participants
Major trauma patients (N=28,522) aged 18 years and older who were registered by the
VSTR, with dates of injury from 2007 to 2016, and who survived to at least 1 year
after injury, were included in this study. Major trauma cases were classified into
4 groups: (1) orthopedic injury, (2) severe traumatic brain injury (s-TBI), (3) spinal
cord injury, and (4) other major trauma.
Intervention
Not applicable.
Main Outcome Measure
Prevalence of chronic physical health conditions.
Results
The cumulative prevalence of any chronic physical health condition for all participants
was 69.3%. The s-TBI group had the highest cumulative prevalence of conditions. The
most common conditions were arthritis and arthropathies, cancer, and cardiovascular
diseases. Preinjury chronic conditions were most common in people with s-TBI (19.3%)
and were least common in people with other types of major trauma (6.6%). The highest
prevalence of new-onset conditions after injury was found in people with s-TBI (21.7%)
and orthopedic major trauma (21.4%), whereas the lowest prevalence was found in people
with other types of major trauma (9.2%). For the orthopedic injury group, there were
no significant differences in the adjusted risk of conditions reported 1 to 5 years
postinjury compared with other major trauma groups.
Conclusions
Chronic physical health conditions were common among all injury groups. There was
no significant difference in the risk of chronic conditions among injury groups. Rehabilitation
practitioners should be aware of the risk of chronic conditions in people with orthopedic
and other types of major trauma. Long-term follow-up care after injury should include
prevention and treatment of chronic conditions.
Keywords
List of abbreviations:
BDM (Births, Deaths and Marriages), CIF (cumulative incidence function), CVD (cardiovascular disease), ED (emergency department), EQ-VAS (EuroQol-visual analog scale), ICD-10-AM (International Classification of Diseases, 10th Edition, Australian Modification), ISS (Injury Severity Score), SCI (spinal cord injury), s-TBI (severe traumatic brain injury), TBI (traumatic brain injury), VAED (Victorian Admitted Episodes Dataset), VEMD (Victorian Emergency Minimum Dataset), VSTR (Victorian State Trauma Registry)To read this article in full you will need to make a payment
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Article info
Publication history
Published online: January 08, 2022
Accepted:
December 13,
2021
Received in revised form:
November 17,
2021
Received:
May 10,
2021
Footnotes
The Victorian State Trauma Registry is funded by the Victorian Department of Health and the Transport Accident Commission. A.Y.G is supported by a Monash graduate scholarship, and B.J.G is supported by an Australian Research Council (ARC) Future Fellowship (FT170100048).
Disclosure: none.
Identification
Copyright
© 2022 by the American Congress of Rehabilitation Medicine.
