The Association Between Early Discharge and Long-Term Outcome of Patients with Traumatic Intracranial Hemorrhage

Head trauma is associated with high morbidity and mortality. A common complication of head trauma is the intracranial hemorrhage (ICH). This study was performed to evaluate the association between early discharge and long-term outcomes of patients with traumatic ICH.

In this prospective cohort, patients with traumatic ICH referring to the emergency departments (EDs) of two teaching hospitals were investigated. Demographic and clinical characteristics of the patients were recorded in the checklists and then a radiologic assessment was done. According to the time of discharge, the patients were divided into two groups: early discharge (≤ 24 hours) and late discharge (> 24 hours). The collected data were analyzed using SPSS-24.

A total of 28 patients (84.8%) in the early discharge group and 36 patients (81.8%) in the late discharge group completed the study. The age distribution was similar in the two groups. The most common clinical symptoms after discharge were a headache in the first group and a headache plus vertigo in the second group (n = 7, 25.0% vs. n = 4, 11.1%; P = 0.020). At the end of the follow-up, in the first group, 28 patients (100%) had a GOS of 5 and in the second group, 33 patients (91.7%) had a GOS of 5 and 3 patients (8.3%) had a GOS of 4, showing no statistically significant differences (P = 0.118).

The results of this study showed that traumatic ICH patients with early discharge had fairly similar outcomes to patients with late discharge.