Traumatic brain injury and variants of shock index.

Abstract

Traumatic Brain Injury is a major cause of death and long-term disability. The early identification of patients at high risk of mortality is important for both management and prognosis. Although many modified scoring systems have been developed for improving the prediction accuracy in patients with trauma, few studies have focused on prediction accuracy and application in patients with traumatic brain injury. The shock index (SI) which was first introduced in the 1960s has shown to strongly correlate degree of circulatory shock with increasing SI. In this editorial we comment on a publication by Carteri et al wherein they perform a retrospective analysis studying the predictive potential of SI and its variants in populations with severe traumatic brain injury.