Blunt thoracic trauma in multiple injury.

In a series of 102 patients with multiple injury including a blunt lesion of the chest treated in 1970 through 1973 the mortality rate could be reduced to 17 per cent. This compares favourably with a mortality of about 34 per cent in a similar group of patients treated in the same hospital during 1965 through 1969. The improvement is partly due to increasing experience of the surgical and anaesthesiological teams and especially to a better appreciation of the importance of ventilatory pulmonary insufficiency and acute respiratory distress syndrome which are frequent in these patients. Early respiratory assistance is indicated in all cases with an instability of the chest wall. The imminence of a respiratory distress syndrome may announce itself by the classical symptoms of an increased breathing rate with hypocarbia before hypoxia becomes manifest. In the majority of patients with a thoracic lesion however the syndrome starts with a combination of increasing dyspnoea and normo- or even hypercarbia. This should be recognized and promptly treated by artificial respiration before acidosis and hypoxia with cardiac arrest can occur.