He was successfully resuscitated and operated; unfortunately he demised postoperatively.

There was one patient with stab wounds to the axillary artery, neck, chest, abdomen and lower extremities who developed DIC and demised postoperatively in ICU at the day of admission. Thus concomitant trauma to neighbouring organ regions outweighed the vascular trauma in terms of mortality by far. Discussion and conclusion Over CP673451 mw the last 20 years there has been a gradual reduction in the incidence of penetrating trauma presenting in our hospital, with a corresponding reduction of penetrating arterial injuries. In 1994 the incidence of penetrating trauma presenting at the Chris Hani Baragwanath Academic Hospital was 95% compared to 5% of blunt

trauma. In 2008 the incidence of penetrating trauma was 47% compared to SGC-CBP30 ic50 53% of blunt trauma. As penetrating trauma is directly related to crime, it would seem that crime in Soweto has diminished over the years. The reason for this is three fold: Firstly, the establishment of democracy led to the disappearance of political violence. Secondly, there are more employment opportunities for the previously disadvantaged population groups. Thirdly, the population now considers police as their protector and not as an oppressior of the Apartheid regime, this leading to increased population – police cooperation. Another change that has developed over the years is that there are more patients referred from the district hospitals that are covered by our hospital. This results in a significant number of patients with delayed presentation, leading to a considerable number of primary amputation or thrombotic postoperative complications in this group of

patients. Diagnosticwise, the use of CT arteriography (CTA) has completely replaced the conventional “invasive” arteriography in our hospital and has greatly facilitated the investigations of arterial trauma. In our experience it has been satisfactory in all cases and it there was never any need to perform conventional arteriography. Hitherto, especially if there is clinical presence of hard symptoms of vascular injury, the positive predictive value is close to 100% [9]. Mindbogglingly, infrapopliteal vasospasms have not been found in surgical explorations with pathological LY294002 CTA. The mortality within our patient group is 5/113 patients, with 3 deaths attributed to DIC and coagulopathy. It may be selleck inhibitor pointed out that associated penetrating trauma to nerves, veins, and other body regions are still not uncommon in South Africa. We noticed a relatively small incidence on nerve injury in popliteal injuries in our collective (12%), which is said to ultimately to determine the functional outcome of the limb [10, 11]. If we compare our patients’ trauma with penetrating injuries from other studies, 2/3 of all penetrating vascular injuries here are gunshot-related, where others studies are dominated by stab injuries [12, 13].