THURSDAY, March 23 (HealthDay News) -- Improvised explosive devices (IEDs) cause the most severe musculoskeletal wounds and almost half the amputations in combat casualties treated at military field hospitals in Iraq, according to research presented this week at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons in Chicago.
Capt. Dana C. Covey. M.D., of the Naval Medical Center in San Diego, and colleagues studied data on 377 patients treated at a U.S. Marine Corps field hospital in Fallujah, Iraq, between March 2004 and February 2005.
Overall, 143 patients were injured by gunshots, versus 234 harmed by explosives. Four hundred of the 879 surgeries were for soft tissue wounds to the extremities or open fractures, the researchers report. IEDs caused the worst damage and almost half the amputations, they found.
Explosives caused different injuries from gunshots, but roughly the same number of wounds to arms and legs.
"Injuries from IEDs and other explosive ordnance in Iraq markedly differ from gunshot wounds, and result in an increased percentage of upper extremity trauma compared with previous conflicts," the authors write. "The contamination and soft tissue injury caused by exploding ordnance requires a different treatment approach than for most gunshot wounds."
Abstract
