Background: A quantitative method for measuring trauma severity has many potential applications: patient triage, a common terminology about injuries severity, prognosis assessment, trauma care audit and epidemiological.
Method: Systematic review of the literature using computer searching of Library of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health International MEDLINE database using PubMed Entre interface. We have selected articles about the main scoring systems used in today's trauma care.
Results: Trauma scores were introduced more than 30 years ago, for assigning numerical values to anatomical lesions and physiological changes after an injury. Physiologic Scores describe changes due to a trauma and translated by changes in vital signs and consciousness. Anatomical Scores describe all the injuries recorded by clinical examination, imaging, surgery or autopsy. If physiological scores are used at first contact with the patient (for triage) and then repeated to monitor patient progress, anatomic scores are used after the diagnosis is complete, generally after patient discharge or postmortem. They are used to stratify trauma patients and to measure lesion severity. Scores that include both anatomical and physiological criteria (mixed scores) are useful for patient prognosis.
Conclusions: Despite their imperfections, trauma scores are very important tools in trauma patients management and research. Using large national databases allow a better research, validation and development of scoring systems.