Medico-Legal Update

Abstract

Background: Head Injury is the single most common cause of mortality in vehicle accidents. Its outcome is a product of different mechanisms, types and amounts of head injuries and their anatomical locations. Objective: To analyze the pattern of fatal head Injury in road traffic accidents at SMS Hospital, Jaipur; a tertiary care centre.

Subjects: Cases of Road Traffic Accidents with fatal head injury subjected to medico-legal autopsy at the Department of Forensic Medicine, SMS Medical College and Hospital Jaipur, Rajasthan, India - a tertiary care center.

Main outcome: Young adults (both males and females) in their most productive years of life are especially prone to head injury, as a result of vehicle accidents. The use of helmets as preventive measure has checked the external and bony injuries to skull region but there is an urgent need to plan further prevention in such cases to check internal brain injuries caused due to movement of brain in cranial cavity.

Results: Males clearly outnumbered females with male to female ratio as 4.7:1. Motor-cyclists were the commonest group of victims. Head injury was the commonest cause of death comprising 53.5% cases. Intracranial hemorrhage of one or more vascular components was the commonest type of injury. The most frequent pattern was a combination of subdural, subarachnoid and intracerebral hematomas i.e. 23 (34.9%). This was followed by Subarachnoid and Intracerebral 13 (19.7%) and subdural and subarachnoid 09 (13.6%). Out of 16 (24.24%) single compartment hemorrhage, the most frequent was intracerebral 08 (50%), followed by subdural 5 (31.25%) and subarachnoid 2 (12.5%) hemorrhage.

Conclusion: Prompt treatment should be instituted to all cases of trauma particularly head injury to prevent fatality. Also there is a need to plan preventive measures.

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