Evidence of race and gender disparities in outcomes were found in black patients, especially in black females who underwent surgical resection for brain metastases. These findings highlight an opportunity to reduce the gap of outcome disparities in brain metastasis patients.
Risk factors associated with treatment delay in aSAH patients include older age, nonwhite race, surgical clipping, and admission to low surgical volume hospitals.
The interaction of age, sex, and outcomes of children with head injury remains incompletely understood and these factors need rigorous evaluation in prognostic models for pediatric head injury. We leveraged our large institutional pediatric TBI population to evaluate age and sex along with a series of predictive factors used in the acute care of injury to describe the response and outcome of children and adolescents with moderate to severe injury. We hypothesized that younger age at injury and male sex would be associated with adverse outcomes and that a novel GCS-based scale incorporating pupillary response (GCS-P) would have superior performance in predicting 6-month outcome. GCS and GCS-P along with established CT scan variables associated with neurologic outcomes were retrospectively reviewed in children (age birth to 18 years) with moderate or severe head injury. GOS-E was prospectively collected 6 months after injury; 570 patients were enrolled in the study, 520 with TBI and 50 with abusive head trauma, each analyzed separately. In the TBI cohort, the median age of patients was 8 years and 42.7% had a severe head injury. Multiple predictors of outcome were identified in univariate analysis; however, based on a multivariate analysis, the GCS was identified as most reliable, outperforming GCS-P, pupil score, and other clinical and CT scan predictors. After stratifying patients for severity of injury by GCS, no age- or sex-related effects were observed in our patient population, except for a trend toward worse outcomes in the neonatal group. Patients with abusive head trauma were more likely to have severe injury on presentation, increased mortality rate, and unfavorable outcome. Additionally, there was clear evidence that secondary injuries, including hypoxia, hypotension, and hypothermia were significantly associated with lower GCS and higher mortality in both AHT and TBI populations. Our findings support the use of GCS to guide clinical decision-making and prognostication in addition to emphasizing the need to stratify head injuries for severity when undertaking outcome studies. Finally, secondary injuries are a clear predictor of poor outcome and how we record and manage these events need to be considered moving forward.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.