Long-term survival of persons ventilator dependent after spinal cord injury.

Background/objective: Identify factors related to long-term survival, and quantify their effect on mortality and life expectancy.

Setting: Model spinal cord injury systems of care across the United States.

Study Design: Survival analysis of persons with traumatic spinal cord injury who are ventilator dependent at discharge from inpatient rehabilitation and who survive at least 1 year after injury.

Methods: Logistic regression analysis on a data set of 1,986 person-years occurring among 319 individuals injured from 1973 through 2003.

Results: The key factors related to long-term survival were age, time since injury, neurologic level, and degree of completeness of injury. The life expectancies were modestly lower than previous estimates. Pneumonia and other respiratory conditions remain the leading cause of death but account for only 31% of deaths of known causes.

Conclusions: Whereas previous research has suggested a dramatic improvement in survival over the last few decades in this population, this is only the case during the critical first few years after injury. There was no evidence for such a trend in the subsequent period.