Predicting recovery from head injury.

Outcome prediction after severe head injury remains an important issue. We investigated this problem by recording seven risk factors in 40 patients with severe head injury. By applying multivariate statistical analysis to the patients' data we selected the factors of prognostic significance: degree of initial neurological damage, severely raised intracranial pressure, and age. We compared clinical and biochemical parameters for evaluating the severity of brain lesion and proposed various simple prognostic indices allowing for correct prediction in more than 85% of patients.