Recently, the lifespan has been prolonged in the patients with spinal cord injury, which has resulted in change to the cause of death of them.
This study intended to inspect the cause of death and the survival length of spinal cord injured patients, and to help prevent and manage fatal complications, so the life expectancies increase much further.
There were total 42 patients with deceased chronic, traumatic spinal cord injury including 11 quadriplegics and 31 paraplegics.
The average length of survival of the deceased spinal cord injured patients was 23.6 years, in which that of quadriplegics was 18.9 years, and paraplegics was 25.3 years. but the paraplegics has a longer survival length than quadriplegics, but showing no statistically significant difference (p>0.05).
The respiratory disease and kidney and urinary tract disease is the leading cause of death followed by cardiovascular disease and sepsis, and other cause such as malignancy, unknown origin digestive diseases, suicide, and accident in order of the frequency in deceased spinal cord injured patients.
And the urinary tract disease was the major cause of death among paraplegics, whereas respiratory disease was the leading cause of death among quadriplegics, but it was no significant correlation between neurologic level and cause of death in spinal cord injury.
