Differences in Cervical Spine Fractures in Patients Younger or Older Than 65 Years of Age: Implications for the Canadian C-Spine Rule
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE: There has been a distinction made in the 2001 Canadian C-Spine Rule regarding patients 65 and older and younger than 65 years of age as far as indications for cervical spine CT scanning. We sought to determine if there are differences in the symptoms, mechanisms of injury, fracture locations, and types that are still relevant in 2024. MATERIALS AND METHODS: The institutional review board approved this retrospective study of cervical spine CT emergency department results from 2 hospitals in our health system after reviewing 5 years of data in patients experiencing trauma. In addition to the primary variable of age (younger than 65 years and 65 years and older), we looked at injury mechanism, fracture types, sites, symptoms, and operative or medical treatments. Because the demographics of our home site is different from most towns in the United States, we provide race/ethnicity data. RESULTS: Of 21,986 cervical spine CTs, 190/9455 (2.0%) participants 65 years of age and older and 199/12,531 (1.6%) participants younger than 65 years of age had fractures (total, 389/21,986, 1.8%). There were more cases of falls from standing (106, 55.8%) and falls from a height (46, 4.2%) in those 65 years and older and this mechanism was associated with a higher risk of C1 and C2 fractures (52, 27.4%; and 78, 41.1%, respectively). Among the C1 fractures, anterior and posterior arch fractures predominated (37, 19.5%). For C2 fractures, types 2 and 3 odontoid fractures (39, 20.5%; and 12, 6.3%) were more common in the older cohort. Motor vehicle collisions were more common in the younger cohort (89, 44.7%), and they were associated with more C5-C7 fractures (47, 23.6%; 60, 30.2%; and 66, 33.2%, respectively) including the facets (49, 24.6%), spinous processes (31, 15.6%), and transverse processes (52, 26.1%). Overall, the rates of instability, surgical intervention, and asymptomatic fractures were similar in the 2 age groups. CONCLUSIONS: Cervical spine fractures appear in about 1.8% of the CT scans performed in a busy emergency department environment. Fractures in the elderly occur more commonly due to falls, are located at C1 and C2, and may involve ligamentous injuries. Younger patients incur trauma more commonly due to motor vehicle collisions, and they are more likely to affect the posterior elements, especially C5-C7. The differences in trends for fractures in the 65 years of age and older and younger than 65 years of age groups have persisted since the Canadian C-Spine Rule 1996-1998 data were collected.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".