ER visits for head injuries jump 29% over 4 years

Concussions are a growth industry for hospital emergency rooms in the United States, according to a new report.

Between 2006 and 2010, the total number of visits to emergency departments in a nationwide sample of hospitals increased by 3.6 percent. During that same period, the number of visits by patients seeking treatment for a traumatic brain injury increased by 29.1 percent, researchers reported last week in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

The much-larger increase in brain-injury patients could be because of a number of factors, the researchers wrote. There might be an actual increase in the number of head injuries suffered by patients, or the figures might be a sign that Americans are taking these injuries more seriously and getting treatment for things they

One possible factor is that Americans are taking concussions more seriously and so are more likely to seek treatment.

would have brushed off in the past. It’s certainly possible that both factors are at play, they wrote.

The researchers, from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and Harvard Medical School, used data from the Nationwide Emergency Department Sample to assess visits to ERs. The sample includes information from more than 950 hospitals.

The researchers zeroed in on patient visits for concussions, skull fractures, cerebral lacerations and contusions, various types of hemorrhages, other brain injuries and unspecified head injuries.

The increase in braininjury treatment mainly was because of patients with concussions (whose incidence grew by 22 percent) and unspecified head injuries (whose incidence grew by 38 percent), according to the JAMA report. There was also a nearly 8 percent rise in skull fractures.

The proportion of traumatic brain injuries classified as “minor” increased slightly, from 85.4 percent in 2006 to 87.3 percent in 2010. In addition, the proportion of patients who had a “routine discharge” after being seen in the ER increased from 75.2 percent to 81.3 percent in the same period.

When examined by age group, the largest increases in traumatic brain injury-related visits were among children younger than 3 and adults older than 60, the researchers found. They interpreted that as a sign that people in these age groups “do not benefit as much from public-health interventions, such as concussion and helmet laws and safer sports practices.”