The utility of scores in the decision to salvage or amputation in severely injured limbs
Rajasekaran Shanmuganathan, Rajasekaran Shanmuganathan
Abstract
The decision to amputate or salvage a severely injured limb can be very challenging to the trauma surgeon. A misjudgment will result in either an unnecessary amputation of a valuable limb or a secondary amputation after failed salvage. Numerous scores have been proposed to provide guidelines to the treating surgeon, the notable of which are Mangled extremity severity score (MESS); the predictive salvage index (PSI); the Limb Salvage Index (LSI); the Nerve Injury, Ischemia, Soft tissue injury, Skeletal injury, Shock and Age of patient (NISSSA) score; and the Hannover fracture scale-97 (HFS-97). These scores have all been designed to evaluate limbs with combined orthopaedic and vascular injuries and have a poor sensitivity and specificity in evaluating IIIB injuries. Recently the Ganga Hospital Score (GHS) has been proposed which is specifically designed to evaluate a IIIB injury. Another notable feature of GHS is that it offers guidelines in the choice of the appropriate reconstruction protocol. The basis of the commonly used scores with their utility have been discussed in this paper.
Keywords: Open fractures; limb injury severity score; severely injured limbs.
Conflict of interest statement
Conflict of Interest: None.
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References
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Source: PubMed