Geriatric head injuries - Experience and expectations

It is widely known that global citizenry is continuing to age. The elderly head trauma patients, comprising 4.83% in our series are important from neurosurgical aspects. We conducted a study of elderly head injury patients admitted to our unit in last 11 years. Out of 620 patients, 423 males and 197 female, constituting a ratio of 2.1∶1. Fall constitutes the principle mode of injury (56.29%) followed by RTA (44.1%). We analyzed all the cases for surgical intervention after careful assessment of neurological condition. Amongst all cases operated for acute trauma, good recovery was seen in 51.8% and mortality in 41.7%, whereas in chronic subdural haematoma 84.2% cases showed good recovery as against mortality in 10.5%. In our society, due to very close family ties and desperation of family members to try active intervention even in patients with expected bleak outcome, we operated a fairly large number of cases and concluded that outcome was better after operative intervention.