CHICAGO –
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A study of individuals at a single institution who were hospitalized and had a prior history of gunshot wound found some patterns of injury that set patients up for a greater likelihood of readmission.
In particular, patients who sustained visceral gunshot wounds were over six times more likely to be readmitted to the hospital, Corbin Pomeranz, MD, a radiology resident at Thomas Jefferson University, Philadelphia, said in an interview at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America. Dr. Pomeranz led the retrospective study that begins to fill a knowledge gap about what happens over the long term to those who sustain gunshot wounds.
“There continues to be profound lack of substantial information related to gun violence, particularly in predicting long-term outcomes,” Dr. Pomeranz and coauthors wrote in the abstract accompanying the presentation.
The researchers performed a single-site retrospective analysis over 3 months in 2018, tapping into an imaging database and looking for inpatient imaging exams that were nonacute, but related to gunshot wounds. From this information, the researchers went back to the original gunshot wound injury imaging, and recorded the pattern of injury, classifying wounds as neurologic, vascular, visceral, musculoskeletal, or involving multiple systems.
The investigators were able to glean additional information including the initial admitting hospital unit, information about interval admissions or surgeries, and demographic data. Regarding the nature of the gunshot injury itself, Dr. Pomeranz and coauthors went back to the earlier imaging studies to note bullet morphology, recording whether the bullet was intact, deformed, or had splintered into shrapnel within injured tissues.
In all, 174 imaging studies involving 110 patients were examined. Men made up 92% of the study population; the average age was 49.7 years. Neurologic and visceral gunshot wounds were moderately correlated with subsequent readmission (r = .436; P less than .001). However, some of this effect was blunted when patient age was controlled for in the statistical analysis.
Patients who were initially admitted to the intensive care unit, and who presumably had more severe injuries, were also more likely to be readmitted (r = .494, P less than .001). Here, “controlling for age had very little effect on the strength of the relationship between these two variables,” noted Dr. Pomeranz and coauthors.
A more elaborate statistical model incorporated several independent variables including age, type of injury, and body region involved, as well as bullet morphology. In this model, visceral injury was the strongest predictor for readmission, with an odds ratio of 6.44.
Dr. Pomeranz said that both the initial gunshot wound and subsequent gaps in care can contribute to readmissions. A patient who has a spinal cord injury may not be reimbursed adequately for supportive cushioning, or an appropriate wheelchair, and so may require admission for decubitus ulcers.
The number of admissions for osteomyelitis, which made up more than half of the subsequent admissions, initially surprised Dr. Pomeranz, until he realized that lack of mobility and sensory losses from gunshot-induced spinal cord injuries could easily lead to nonhealing lower extremity wounds, with osteomyelitis as a sequela.
Several patients were admitted for small bowel obstructions with no interval surgery since treatment for the gunshot wound. These readmissions, said Dr. Pomeranz, were assessed as related to the gunshot wound since it’s extremely rare for a patient with no history of abdominal surgery and no malignancy to have a small bowel obstruction. Exploratory laparotomies are common in the context of abdominal trauma caused by gunshot wounds, and either the gunshot itself or the laparotomy was the likely cause of adhesions.
Dr. Pomeranz acknowledged the many limitations of the study, but pointed out that some will be addressed when he and his coauthors conduct a larger study they have planned to look at readmissions from gunshot wounds at multiple hospitals in the Philadelphia area. The small sample size in the current study meant that the impact of socioeconomic status and other lifestyle and social variables and comorbidities couldn’t be adequately addressed in the statistical analysis. By casting a wider net within the greater Philadelphia area, the investigators should be able to track patients who receive care in more than one hospital system, increasing participant numbers, he said.
“Morbidity and outcomes from gun violence can only be assessed after a firm understanding of injury patterns on imaging,” noted Dr. Pomeranz. He said that interdisciplinary research investigating individual and societal short- and long-term costs of gun violence is sorely needed to inform public policy.
Dr. Pomeranz reported no outside sources of funding and reported that he had no conflicts of interest.
SOURCE: Pomeranz C et al. RSNA 2019, Presentation HP226-SD-THA3.