| CLINICAL ANALYSIS OF THE RELATIONS BETWEEN THE INJURY SEVERITY AND PAIN SENSE IN GERIATRIC PATIENTS |
| Jin Woong Lee, Kyoung Soo Lim, Young Sik Kim, Sung Oh Hwang, Kang Hyun Lee, Sun Man Kim, Hyeon Kim |
| Department of Emergency Medicine, Wonju College of medicine, Yonsei University |
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Published online: March 31, 1996. |
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| ABSTRACT |
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Because elderly individuals are participitating in social work as adult inspite of their physical handicapes such as hearing difficulty, visual difficulty and limit of motion, they are continually exposed to the risk of injury. Trauma is now fifth cause of death in elderly of over 65 years old, and the elderly suffer disproportionately high injury-related motality comparing with younger adults. In addition, sometimes elderly patients don't complaint of pain on injured site because of high threshold to pain. We studied about occurence of neglected injury due to high threshold to pain in geriatric trauma patients. When we diagnosised injury that patients did not complaint of pain on injured site through physical examination and radiologic examination, we defined that as neglected injury. There were 8 (8%) geriatric patients who didn't complaint of pain on injured site on admission to emergency center, but only 0.7 % of adult patients had neglected injury. The severity was estimated by use of AIS (Abbreviated Injury Scale), and the severity of all neglected injuries were above AIS 2 point. The neglected injury were head injuries(4 in number), abdominal injury1l), pelvic injuries(2) and extremity
injury(1).
So if geriatric trauma patients were admitted to emergency center, we recommand full physical and radiological examinations although patients don' t complaint of pain.
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| Key words:
Geriatrics, Neglected injury |
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