Cervical spinal cord injury: the correlations of initial clinical features and blood gas analyses with early prognosis.

The predictive values of some early post-traumatic clinical symptoms and signs and laboratory tests on the problems, complications and prognosis of the initial treatment of tetraplegic patients were studied. The study was carried out by scrutinizing the files of 54 patients with a cervical spinal cord injury (40 of them complete and 14 incomplete). Most of the patients (n = 43) needed ventilatory support, the duration of which depended on the level and completeness of the spinal cord injury. Bradycardia, hypotonia and tachypnoea at admission occurred most frequently in those patients who later developed complications or died. In addition, the frequency of complications correlated with a patient's age, previous diseases and with the height and degree of the spinal cord injury. Tachypnoea on admission forecast the later development of respiratory complications. All 8 patients who died, 5 of them from pneumonia and 3 from pulmonary embolism, had their spinal cord injury at the level C4 to C5 and they were significantly older than those who survived.