• Neurosurgery · Jul 2013

    The epidemiology of outpatient visits for minor head injury: 2005 to 2009.

    • Rebekah Mannix, Michael J O'Brien, and William P Meehan.
    • Division of Emergency Medicine, Children's Hospital Boston, Boston, Massachusetts, USA. Rebekah.Mannix@childrens.harvard.edu
    • Neurosurgery. 2013 Jul 1;73(1):129-34; discussion 134.

    BackgroundThe Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have called for studies detailing the prevalence and burden of mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) in the outpatient clinical setting.ObjectiveThe aim of this study was to describe the prevalence of outpatient visits for minor head injury and compare the number of outpatient visits for minor head injury with the number of emergency department (ED) visits.MethodsThis was a cross-sectional study of outpatient visits for minor head injuries from the National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey (NAMCS) and the National Hospital Ambulatory Medical Care Survey (NHAMCS). We examined outpatient visits for minor head injury between 2005 and 2009 and compared them with visits in the ED for the same diagnoses using simple survey-weighted descriptive statistics.ResultsIn the 5-year study period, there were 4 146 777 outpatient visits for minor head injury and 6 077 147 ED visits for minor head injury. In the outpatient setting, 14% of office-based visits and 21% of hospital-based visits referred patients for advanced imaging, whereas 63% of minor head injury patients in the ED underwent imaging. A return visit was arranged for 54% of minor head injury patients in office-based practices and 29% of patients in hospital-based clinics, while 67% of minor head injury patients were given instructions to follow-up after an ED visit.ConclusionMore than 800 000 outpatient visits for minor head injury occur each year. The diagnostics and management associated with these visits differ from those seen in the ED setting.

      Pubmed     Full text   Copy Citation     Plaintext  

      Add institutional full text...

    Notes

     
    Knowledge, pearl, summary or comment to share?
    300 characters remaining
    help        
    You can also include formatting, links, images and footnotes in your notes
    • Simple formatting can be added to notes, such as *italics*, _underline_ or **bold**.
    • Superscript can be denoted by <sup>text</sup> and subscript <sub>text</sub>.
    • Numbered or bulleted lists can be created using either numbered lines 1. 2. 3., hyphens - or asterisks *.
    • Links can be included with: [my link to pubmed](http://pubmed.com)
    • Images can be included with: ![alt text](https://bestmedicaljournal.com/study_graph.jpg "Image Title Text")
    • For footnotes use [^1](This is a footnote.) inline.
    • Or use an inline reference [^1] to refer to a longer footnote elseweher in the document [^1]: This is a long footnote..

    hide…