[Definition of "polytrauma" and "polytraumatism"]

Abstract

Polytrauma (multitrauma) is a short verbal equivalent used for severely injured patients usually with associated injury (i.e. two or more severe injuries in at least two areas of the body), less often with a multiple injury (i.e. two or more severe injuries in one body area). An important condition for the use of the term polytrauma is the incidence of the traumatic shock and/or hemorrhagic hypotensis and a serious endangering of one or more vital functions of the organism. At least one out of two or more injuries or the sum total of all injuries endangers the life of the injured person with polytrauma. For its variable and non-homogeneous content the term polytrauma cannot be used as a final diagnosis without an objective quantification of the extent of the severity of the injury. The author therefore recommends to use this term to express a severe injury endangering the life as a general term which must be necessarily specified by the actual morphological and functional diagnoses. The term "polytraumatism" used in practice is not exactly a synonym of polytrauma, however, it has a direct generalizing relation to it. Polytraumatism embraces the broad health care and general societal problem area relating to severe associated and multiple injuries (i.e. to polytrauma). The author presents the actual classification of polytraumas according to their severity into four, three or two groups. This classification is based on the principles of general quantification of the severity of the injury (from the viewpoint of individual injuries and at the same time from the viewpoint of all concurrent injuries) divided into five or six grades.