BACKGROUND CONTEXT The current approach to the evaluation and treatment of military casualties in the Global War on Terror is informed by medical experience from prior conflicts and combat encounters from the last 10 years. In an effort to standardize the care provided to military casualties in the ongoing conflicts, the Department of Defense (DoD) has published Clinical Practice Guidelines (CP...

As trauma surgeons, we are commonly engaged in treating injuries caused by impacts. For many years, advancements in the care and management of the injured were strongly linked to military conflicts (1). Injury is the number one public health problem in the USA, with a price tag of over $260 billion annually (2). In Iran, road accidents are still the most common cause of mortality among civilian...

Violence fromexplosivesand firearms results inmass casualty events inwhich the injured havemultiple penetrating and soft tissue injuries. Events such as those in Boston,Massachusetts;Newtown,Connecticut;andAurora, Colorado, as well as those in other locations, such as Europe and the Middle East, demonstrate that civilian trauma may at times resemble that seen in a combat setting. As the civilia...

OBJECTIVES To identify potentially fatal injury patterns in explosive blast fatalities in order to focus research and mitigation strategies, to further improve survival rates from blast trauma. DESIGN Retrospective cohort study. PARTICIPANTS UK military personnel killed by improvised explosive device (IED) blasts in Afghanistan, November 2007-August 2010. SETTING UK military deployment, t...

BACKGROUND The total number, rates, and causes of mortality in Kosovo during the last war remain unclear despite intense international attention. Understanding mortality that results from modern warfare, in which 90% of casualties are civilian, and identifying vulnerable civilian groups, are of critical public-health importance. METHODS In September 1999 we conducted a two-stage cluster surve...

Lethal weaponry and tactics used by enemy forces in Operations Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom have resulted in complex multisystem injury patterns among US allied military personnel engaged in combat operations. Military medical personnel deployed in support of these campaigns have had to maintain a high degree of clinical skill to effectively render care to wounded combatants, a necessity ...

BACKGROUND This article reports on the occurrences and patterns of genitourinary (GU) trauma in the contemporary high-intensity conflict of the overseas contingency operations (OCOs). METHODS The Joint Theater Trauma Registry was queried for all US military members who received treatment for GU wounds and concomitant injuries sustained in OCOs for >75 months between October 2001 and January 2...

BACKGROUND Anatomic measures of injury burden provide key information for studies of prehospital and in-hospital trauma care. The military version of the Abbreviated Injury Scale [AIS(M)] is used to score injuries in deployed military hospitals. Estimates of total trauma burden are derived from this. These scores are used for categorization of patients, assessment of care quality, and research ...