Abstract
The authors studied the influence of patient's age on head trauma and outcome in 980 patients with chronic subdural hematoma (chronic SDH). The patients were operated on during the last 14 years (1975-1988). The age of the patients was ranged from 1 to 93 years old. According to year-specific changes in the number of these patients, it has increased every year to become almost 3-fold over this period, especially among the elderly patients. The rate of extremely aged patients who were over 65 years old, accounted for 54.5% of the total patients. These disorder occured most frequently in the elderly, especially 70-to-79 year-old patients. Males predominated in each aged patients. However, the male/female ratio decreased significantly with increasing age.
Head trauma was certainly present as the cause of chronic SDH in a higher number of the aged paients. But we noticed that the presence of head trauma was much less than those of reported by other authors. Functional outcome in this study was evaluated by the Glasgow Outcome Scale. Among 534 cases with elderly patient, 421 cases were categoriezed as having good recovery (GR), 80 as moderate disability (MD), 17 as severe disability (SD), 11 as persistently vegetative and 11 cases died.
In conclusion, we can procure good results in tho majority of even operated elder-ly patients under longterm follow-up studies in presented cases.
