Articles: traumatic-brain-injuries.
-
Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is a significant health issue among deployed and non-deployed U.S. military service members (SMs). Since 2000, an estimated 413,858 SMs have been diagnosed with at least one TBI. Due to the difficulty in distinguishing new incident TBIs from follow-up TBI-related medical encounters in the Military Health System (MHS), the official TBI case definition also includes an incidence rule considering an individual an incident case only once per lifetime. We sought to examine patterns in medical records of SMs with at least one TBI encounter, in an effort to identify repeat TBIs in individual SMs and to estimate the incidence of repeat TBIs within the study cohort as a whole. ⋯ Probability scores based on statistical modeling can provide reasonable estimates of repeat incidences of TBI using medical billing data when formerly only the first TBI was thought to be measurable. With 100% sensitivity and 69% specificity, application of these models can inform estimates of repeat TBI across the MHS. This effort shows initial success if estimating repeat TBI, and further modeling work is encouraged to increase the predictive characteristics of the models as these efforts show promise in estimating repeat TBI across the MHS.
-
Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is one of the most common injuries resulting from U.S. Military engagements since 2001. Long-term consequences in terms of healthcare utilization are unknown. We sought to evaluate healthcare expenditures among U.S. military service members with TBI, as compared to a matched cohort of uninjured individuals. ⋯ This investigation represents the first continuous observation of healthcare utilization among individuals with combat-related TBI. Our findings speak to continued consumption of health care well beyond the immediate postinjury period, resulting in total expenditures approximately six to seven times higher than those of service members hospitalized for noncombat-related reasons.