Cemil Kavalcı1, Gökhan Akdur2, Serap Yemenici2, Mustafa Burak Sayhan2

1Department Of Emergency, Numune Training And Research Hospital, Ankara, Turkey
2Trakya University Faculty Of Medicine, Emergency Department, Edirne, Turkey

Keywords: Head trauma, emergency, brain natriuretic peptide

Abstract

Objective: Injuries are leading cause of death in persons less than 45 years old. Cranial computed tomography is used for diagnosis in these patients. Brain natriuretic peptide (BNP) was isolated first from the cerebral ventricles. The aim of this study is to search whether bedside BNP measurement has a place in determining intracranial injury in patients admitted to the emergency department with head trauma
Matherial and Methods: The study was done prospectively in the emergency department (ED) of the Trakya University Hospital. 100 patients who were admitted to ED because of head injury and a control group of 20 healthy volunteers were enrolled to the study. Mann-Whitney U test was used to compare the binary groups, and Kruskal-Wallis test to compare multi-groups. p<0.05 was considered to be significant.
Results: Eighty-one patients (81%) were male, and 19 (19%) were female. Median serum BNP level was 5.00 pg/ml in total 86 patients in Cranial CT (-) group. Mean serum BNP level in 14 patients of the Cranial CT (+) group was 6.15 pg/ml. There was no statistically significant difference between these two groups from the point of serum BNP levels ( p>0.05).
Conclusions: We found in our study that serum BNP examination to show any intracranial injury in patients with head trauma was poor.