The Significance of Clinical Examination for Brain Lesion Differentiation of Patients with Head Trauma after Alcohol Intoxication

Abstract

PURPOSE There are many patients visited to ED in an alcohol intoxicated state. For these patients, it is difficult to predict by only clinical examination whether he/she would have brain lesion. The purpose of this study is to research whether it is possible to predict brain lesion by only clinical examination findings, with comparing patients with/without actual brain lesions. METHODS A retrospective study was performed at a university hospital for the period 11 months with the medical records. As for the inclusion group, head trauma patients with objectively proved drunk, judging by their blood ethanol concentration, and performed the brain CT were selected. In terms of medical record, Glasgow coma scale (GCS), the presence of neurologic abnormalities, the presence of lesion on brain CT of the patients, were examined. From laboratory results, blood ethanol concentration, platelet count, prothrombin time (PT), activated partial thromboplastin time (aPTT) and glucose concentration were identified. RESULTS For this study, there were total 80 patients of inclusion group. There was no statistically significant difference in terms of GCS score and neurological examination abnormalities, between the group with brain lesion and the group without brain lesion on brain CT. CONCLUSION Alcohol intoxicated patient with head trauma visits the ED, it is not possible to distinguish or determine whether brain lesion exists or not by only clinical findings. In order to check the lesion existence, the image examination, therefore, should be considered and performed.