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Management of Fire Arm Injury chest, an experience of 10,200 patients
Journal of Cardiothoracic Surgery volume 10, Article number: A15 (2015)
Background/Introduction
Firearm injury chest are among the most common and leading cause of trauma along with roadside accidents in tertiary care hospitals around the world. The situation in the developing world, including Pakistan, is even worse where terrorism, poverty, social inequality, unemployment and access to the illegal weapons are obvious.
Aims/Objectives
To determine the surgical management of fire arm injury chest.
Method
An observational descriptive study was conducted in the department of Thoracic Surgery, Postgraduate Medical Institute, Lady Reading Hospital Peshawar from June 2002 to Dec 2014. The record of all trauma patients that had fire arm injuries undergoing surgical intervention over a period of twelve years was reviewed.
Results
The study included 10,200 patients; all were having firearm injuries leading to hemopneumothorax. Male to female ratio was 2:1. All patients were initially managed with tube thoracostomy. 400/10200 (3.92%) patients underwent emergency Thoracotomy, Rest of the patients i.e. 9801/10200 (96.07%) were hemodynamically stable and treated with low pressure suction and incentive spirometry. In 550/10200 (5.39%) patients which developed clotted hemothorax were evacuated successfully through thoracotomy. The mean time interval between injury and thoracotomy was 14.5 days (range between 11- 124 days). The mean volume of clotted hemothorax evacuated was 650 ml.The mean post-operative hospital stay was 5 days.
Discussion/Conclusion
Majority of fire arm injuries were successfully managed by chest intubations, observation and supported treatment. 400 patients required emergency Thoracotomy, 550 patients went into develop clotted Hemothorax requiring evacuation
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This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.
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Bilal, A. Management of Fire Arm Injury chest, an experience of 10,200 patients. J Cardiothorac Surg 10 (Suppl 1), A15 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1186/1749-8090-10-S1-A15
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/1749-8090-10-S1-A15
Keywords
- Trauma Patient
- Medical Institute
- Social Inequality
- Tertiary Care Hospital
- Pressure Suction