Abstract
BACKGROUND: Persons who sustain severe traumatic injury, i.e., those with an Injury Severity Score (ISS) of 16 or above, go on to suffer major physical, emotional, and socio-economic consequences. It is important to know the incidence of severe trauma so that these patients can be cared for optimally. METHODS: Data from the year 2012 on severely injured persons with an ISS of 16 or above were obtained from the trauma registry of the German Society for Trauma Surgery (DGU) and analyzed. Further information was obtained from the database of the DGU trauma network. The annual incidence of severe trauma was estimated from these data in three different ways. RESULTS: An extrapolation of hospital-based data to the German population yielded a figure of 16 742 severely injured persons per year. A population-based estimate from the German federal state of Bavaria yielded a figure of 16 514/year, while an area-based extrapolation using data from 17 established networks yielded a figure of 16 554/year. We added 10% to each of these figures as a correction for assumed underreporting. We conclude that the number of persons who sustained a severe traumatic injury in Germany in 2012 lay between 18 209 (95% confidence interval [CI]: 17 751-18 646) and 18 416 (95% CI: 18 156-18 695). This corresponds to an incidence of 0.02% per year. CONCLUSION: Data from a prospectively maintained nationwide trauma registry were used for the first time to calculate the annual incidence of severe traumatic injury in Germany: the expected number of severely injured persons per year is 18 200-18 400. Previous extrapolations yielded values in the range of 32 500-35 300. A high variability of documentation practices among supraregional trauma centers may have distorted the estimate, along with other factors. The figures were not normalized for age or sex.