Update 1990 pp 505-513 | Cite as

The Shock Index Revisited

  • R. A. Little
  • D. Gorman
  • M. Allgöwer
Conference paper
Part of the Update in Intensive Care and Emergency Medicine book series (UICM, volume 10)

Abstract

Trauma has been described as the last major plague of the young [1]. This is undoubtedly the case as injury is responsible for more deaths in those less than 44 years of age than, for example, heart disease and malignancies combined. Such a problem should ensure that the treatment of the injured, which has a history as long as that of surgery itself, would now be of the highest quality. That this is not the case was clearly demonstrated by Trunkey et al. in the U.S.A. They showed that as many as 73% of deaths following injury were preventable [2]. A very similar picture was revealed more recently in the U.K.[3]. This retrospective analysis of 1000 trauma deaths indicated that 63–71% of non-head and 29–37% of head injuries were preventable. An important factor in many of these deaths was a failure to recognize the presence and/or extent of blood loss. The inexperience of those first treating such patients may be part of the problem but limitations on the usefulness of the clinical signs of blood loss, an increase in heart rate and hypotension, may also be important.

Keywords

Blood Loss Total Peripheral Resistance Wilcoxon Matched Pair Revise Trauma Score Shock Index 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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Copyright information

© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 1990

Authors and Affiliations

  • R. A. Little
  • D. Gorman
  • M. Allgöwer

There are no affiliations available

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