New Approach for Studying Traumatic Injury

US researchers are collaborating to study the body's response to critical illness and traumatic injuries such as motor vehicle accidents, gunshot wounds, and burns in a project called "Inflammation and the Host Response,” supported by the US National Institute of General Medical Sciences.

After severe trauma or stress, the body's natural defense mechanisms can trigger an often-fatal cascade of events that ends in a series of organ failures. As a result, critical illness and injury account for 8% of deaths in the United States alone each year, typically taking the lives of young, otherwise healthy individuals. Although early treatment for severely injured trauma patients has improved dramatically since the introduction of advanced trauma life support in 1979, there is no evidence-based regimen of care once the ill or injured are transferred to the intensive care unit (ICU). As a result, the mortality rate of ICU patients has barely improved in the past two decades.

"We may actually be making things worse by trying to intervene during the body's natural, adaptive response,” explained J.Perren Cobb, M.D., principal investigator and associate professor of surgery at Washington University School of Medicine (St. Louis, MO, USA), one of the institutions involved in the project.

A group of 19 medical centers will compile an extensive database that includes demographic, genomic, and physiologic information about patients with traumatic injuries. In the process, they plan to develop standard operating procedures for burn and trauma patients and to develop clinically relevant animal models. Washington University and Stanford University (CA, USA) are leading the genomics component of the project, which is working to identify the functions and relationships of genes expressed during critical illness and injury.

"Our ultimate goal,” says Dr. Cobb, "is to understand, model, and predict how an individual will respond to a given injury and thereby help physicians choose the best treatment for each patient.”




Related Links:
Washington Univ.
Stanford Univ.