TY - JOUR PY - 2013// TI - Hospital stay as a proxy indicator for severe injury in earthquakes: a retrospective analysis JO - PLoS one A1 - Zhao, Lu-Ping A1 - Gerdin, Martin A1 - Westman, Lina A1 - Rodriguez-Llanes, Jose Manuel A1 - Wu, Qi A1 - van den Oever, Barbara A1 - Pan, Liang A1 - Albela, Manuel A1 - Chen, Gao A1 - Zhang, De-Sheng A1 - Guha-Sapir, Debarati A1 - von Schreeb, Johan SP - e61371 EP - e61371 VL - 8 IS - 4 N2 - INTRODUCTION: Earthquakes are the most violent type of natural disasters and injuries are the dominant medical problem in the early phases after earthquakes. However, likely because of poor data availability, high-quality research on injuries after earthquakes is lacking. Length of hospital stay (LOS) has been validated as a proxy indicator for injury severity in high-income settings and could potentially be used in retrospective research of injuries after earthquakes. In this study, we assessed LOS as an adequate proxy indicator for severe injury in trauma survivors of an earthquake. METHODS: A retrospective analysis was conducted using a database of 1,878 injured patients from the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake. Our primary outcome was severe injury, defined as a composite measure of serious injury or resource use. Secondary outcomes were serious injury and resource use, analysed separately. Non-parametric receiver operating characteristics (ROC) and area under the curve (AUC) analysis was used to test the discriminatory accuracy of LOS when used to identify severe injury. An 0.7

Language: en

LA - en SN - 1932-6203 UR - http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0061371 ID - ref1 ER -