Predicting the Long-term Outcome

Abstract

Brief reference to this aspect of the assessment of the long-term outcome has already been made both in the review of previous reports and, in passing, in several earlier chapters. The relationship is examined here between a number of features of the acute and convalescent periods after injury, including the various indirect measures of severity already defined, which seem likely indices of the outcome observed 10–25 years later. Their reliability as predictors in the long-term is then assessed. The data have been studied in three ways. In the first a graphic method has been used to examine selected information available for only the majority of the cases; in the second a computer-assisted numerical analysis has been made; and in the third ‘flow diagrams’ have been drawn to summarise the prediction procedure implied by the statistical analysis.