Epidemiological Study of 1368 Cases of Surgical Repair for Traumatic Peripheral Nerve Injury.

Abstract

Traumatic injury of the peripheral nerves should be treated in specialized centres. This study presents the epidemiological data of 1368 consecutive patients operated for peripheral nerve injuries beside the Service of neurosurgery, Department of Neurosciences, UHC "Mother Theresa", Tirana. In order to obtain the necessary data for this study we revised the clinical records, surgical registers and pre, intra and postoperative photo/video of the cases operated for peripheral nervous system injuries. A data recording program of the surgery cases was built ad hoc, categorizing the cases according to several variables. The data collected from the operated cases were manually inserted to be processed by the program. Results of informatics elaboration of the data were obtained, reviewed and categorized by: age, gender, type of trauma, localization of injury and type of nerve repair. Future studies to be conducted in this field will focus in determining the level of nerve injury, time from the injury to intervention, distance from the site of trauma to the effector organ. The data will build necessary information for data mining, which based on these important factors that influence the result of nerve repair, will be useful for the prediction of the result in new patients harbouring peripheral nerve injury before undergoing surgery.