Abstract:

Anatomical and physiological characteristics of adults and children with are different from each other. Therefore management of similar thoracic injuries may be different between adults and children. Adult and pediatric patients admitted to the emergency department with thoracic trauma were compared in this study. Patients were divided into adults and pediatric. They were evaluated in terms of age, gender, month of admission, etiology of the trauma, thoracic complaints and other accompanying complaints, treatment methods applied the clinics in which they were followed, and outcomes. Of the cases, 82.8 % were male in Group I, and 77.8% of the patients in Group II were male. Of the cases, 220 (64.4%) were blunt traumas, eighty-one (35.6 %) were penetrating traumas. Penetrating traumas were 85.2% in Group I. While the most frequent cause for blunt in Group I was traffic accident in vehicle (43.8%), it was out of vehicle traffic accidents (31.1%) in Group II. Pneumothorax and hemothorax were the most common injuries in both groups, and tube thoracostomy was the most common type of treatment. In addition, determining the ratio of penetrating trauma in the pediatric group was an important finding of our study. J. Exp. Clin. Med., 2013; 30:323-326

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