Cervical spine immobilization is an essential component of the ATLS(®) system. Inadequate training in the management of trauma calls and failure of early recognition can have disastrous consequences. Pre-hospital personnel are routinely involved more in the assessment and stabilization of patients in comparison to other health care professionals.This case study and review highlights the importa...

BACKGROUND The Eastern Association for the Surgery of Trauma (EAST) guidelines recommend that cervical spine (c-spine) radiographic evaluation is unnecessary in the awake, alert blunt trauma patient who is not intoxicated, has no distracting injuries, and demonstrates no tenderness over the c-spine or neurologic deficits. The purpose of this study was to compare the reliability of the clinical ...

The aim of this case report was to highlight the application of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) in elucidating serious and occult injuries in a single case of hyperflextion injury of a patient cervical spine (C-Spine). A chart and radiology review was performed to establish the sequence of care and how the results of imaging studies influenced the clinical management in this trauma case. Plain...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the hypothesis that alert nonintoxicated trauma patients with negative clinical examinations are at no risk of cervical spine injury and do not need any radiographic investigation. DESIGN Prospective study. SETTING A university-affiliated teaching county hospital. PATIENTS Five hundred and forty-nine consecutive alert, oriented, and clinically nonintoxicated blunt tr...

Cervical spine injuries are rarely seen in children with an overall incidence of about 1-1.5% [1,2]. In pediatric cervical spine injury, the upper cervical spine is the most common site affected (52% of cases) [2]. The typical injury mechanisms for pediatric cervical spine injuries are hyper flexion movements as in motor vehicle accidents, because of distinct anatomic properties of a child’s bo...

Question: Does implementation of the Canadian C-spine rule in emergency departments reduce the proportion of patients referred for diagnostic imaging of the cervical spine without a concurrent increase in unidentified cervical spine injuries or serious adverse outcomes? Design: Matched pair cluster randomised trial. Setting: 12 emergency departments of teaching and community hospitals in Canada...

STUDY OBJECTIVE We designed the Canadian C-Spine Rule for the clinical clearance of the cervical spine, without need for diagnostic imaging, in alert and stable trauma patients. Emergency physicians previously validated the Canadian C-Spine Rule in 8,283 patients. This study prospectively evaluates the performance characteristics, reliability, and clinical sensibility of the Canadian C-Spine Ru...

OBJECTIVE A full understanding of an injury event and the mechanical forces involved should be important for predicting specific anatomical patterns of injury. Yet, information on the mechanism of injury is often overlooked as a predictor for specific anatomical injury in clinical decision-making. We measured the relationship between mechanism of injury and risk for cervical spine fracture. M...

The focus of this paper is on the clearance of the cervical spine in those patients who are seriously injured or have the potential to be seriously injured. Specifically excluded from this paper are children. "Whiplash" injury is covered at the end of this paper. Injuries to the cervical spine occur in 2% to 12% ofblunt trauma victims,'" 10% to 20% of patients with serious head injury,5 6 and o...

BACKGROUND Cervical collars are applied to millions of trauma victims with the intent of protecting against secondary spine injuries. Adverse clinical outcomes during the management of trauma patients led to the hypothesis that extrication collars may be harmful in some cases. The literature provides indirect support for this observation. The purpose of this study was to directly evaluate cervi...