Brain and Spinal Cord Injury
Up to 50% of all trauma deaths in the United States involve significant injury to the brain or spinal cord. This chapter highlights the public health significance of traumatic brain and spinal cord injury and examines methodological issues in studies of the epidemiology of these injuries. It addresses methodological challenges in epidemiologic and clinical studies of brain and spinal cord injury, including difficulties in case ascertainment, differing approaches to brain injury classification, and measurement issues in brain injury severity and outcome scales. The chapter summarizes scientific literature addressing demographic and lifestyle risk factors for brain injury including age, sex, and alcohol consumption. External causes of traumatic brain and spinal cord injury are also discussed, including transportation-related injuries and increasingly recognized sports-related brain injuries.
Keywords: brain injury, spinal cord injury, traumatic brain injury, incidence, prevalence, mortality, prognosis, causal factors, risk factors
Oxford Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .