The tetrafigap survey: on the long term risk factors and surmortality of tetraplegic spinal cord injured individuals

Maude Espagnacq, Institut National d'Études Démographiques (INED)

Mortality or handicap are the consequence of the spinal cord injury. Because of car’s accident, sport’s injuries which represent the majority of spinal cord injury cases, young men are the most affected population. There are, two sort of mortality: First mortality just after the injury (traumatic choc causes this kind of mortality), fortunately this has been decreased since the expansion of urgency and reanimation services. Second mortality later after the injury, it is explained by clinic complications, like urinary or cardiovascular complications (in particular for tetraplegia). In 1995, Tetrafigap’s survey has been the specific data which illustrate spinal cord injured people, it is a survey just on tetraplegics people (N=1650). It was the biggest survey on this people in Europe. We have done in 2006, a new survey on the outcome of these persons. We have also made a research on the date and the causes of death (N=227). In this document, we showed the distribution and the level of mortality long time after the injury (between 3 and 45 years). Effectively, there was some works which studied long-term mortality. In fact, we found more double mortality in this population than in the general one. Our study is divided in two parts : first, we wanted to determinate if there is specific causes of death in this population. And then finally with the help of 1995’s survey, we tried to demonstrate prognostic factors of this mortality.