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 -