FACTORS EFFECTING MORTALITY IN PATIENTS WITH GUNSHOT INJURIES

Objective: We planned this study in order to determine the factors affecting mortality in patients with gunshot injuries in more than one organ.Methods: We retrospectively reviewed the hospital records of 714 patients admitted to the Emergency Department of Dicle University, between January 2000 and December 2004. The factors that we considered would affect mortality such as age, sex, attempts suicide, long barreled gun injuries, pellet injuries, contact/near contact shot, delayed admission time, presence of serious anemia and shock during admission, more than four entrance wounds, injury areas, serious cranial, thorax and abdominal injuries, vascular injuries in the extremity, administration of multiple transfusion, and trauma scores as GKS, RTS, PATI were analyzed.Results: As a result of unvaried statistical analyses, we determined that suicide attempts (p=0.001), presence of serious anemia (p=0.001) and shock (p=0.001) during admission, presence of serious cranial (p=0.001), thorax (p=0.001) and abdominal (p=0.001) injury, femoral artery injury (p=0.001), multiple blood transfusion (p=0.009), , GKS 0-7, GKS 8-12 (p=0.001) and low RTS (p=0.001)were significant factors affecting mortality.Conclusion: Multivariate analysis showed that serious anemia during admission, serious cranial injury, serious abdominal injury and low RTS were independently significant in predicting mortality (p<0.05).