Effect of sex and age on traumatic brain injury: a geographical comparative study

BACKGROUND: Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is a much researched topic in medical health, which requires additional studies to understand various effects of demographic and geographic factors that can assist in developing the most effective treatments. Thousands of people of different ages are suffering from lifelong disabilities, either mild or severe, from TBI and the number is increasing. This study aims to increase our understanding of the effect of sex and age by applying five different statistical methods to evaluate the effect of these covariates on two independent TBI data sets representing patients from different geographical cohorts. A primary data was collected from Bangladesh and it was compared with CRASH (Corticosteroid Randomisation after Significant Head Injury) data, representing various countries around the world. METHODS: The outcome variable for TBI considered in this paper is Glasgow Outcome Scale, which is a four point scale. It was converted to a binary outcome scale for fitting of Fisher’s exact test, a test of proportions and a binary linear model. For analyzing ordinal outcomes, the proportional odds model and the sliding dichotomy model were fitted. As the sample size of the Bangladeshi data set was small, parametric bootstrapping was applied for the consistency of results. RESULTS: Females were the worse sufferers of TBI compared to men, according to CRASH data set. The old (aged above 58 years) followed by adults (age 25 to 58) were the most vulnerable victims. Interaction effects concluded that old women tended to endure the worst outcomes of TBI. This conclusion came from the CRASH data set representing the world in general, whereas such effects were not present in the Bangladesh data set. Additional application of parametric bootstrapping for the smaller Bangladesh data set did not result into any significant outcome. CONCLUSION: The effect of gender and age could be stronger in some countries than others which is driving the significance in CRASH and was not found in Bangladesh. It reflects the necessity of incorporating geographic patterns as well as demographic features of patients while developing treatments and designing clinical trials.