Are We Justified Doing Salvage or Amputation Procedure Based on Mangled Extremity Severity Score in Mangled Upper...

Mangled upper limb injuries are at surge because of industrialization, modernization, and severe motor vehicle accidents. The utility of various scoring systems are meant for decision making in mangled lower limb injuries, and the same have been extrapolated for mangled upper limb injuries to make a decision of salvage or amputation for the lack of separate scoring system.

We applied mangled extremity severity score (MESS) and mangled extremity syndrome index (MESI) scoring systems to 10 cases of mangled upper limb injuries during the period of November 2010 to September 2012 presented at our tertiary trauma care center. Average MESS score was 7.7 and MESI score was 18.1. Above elbow, amputation was needed in three patients, and salvage procedure was done in rest of the seven patients. All the patients were subjected to salvage procedure initially unless life threatening because of mangled limb injury. MESS scores over 7, MESI score over 20 is accepted for amputation in lower limbs, but could not be justified in our study for MESS whereas MESI was more reliable. Functional outcome was assessed using visual analog scale score and short form-36 (SF-36) score for all patients, which was satisfactory, elderly and diabetic patients were relatively less satisfied.

(a) Upper limb and lower limb mangled injuries cannot be considered same because of their anatomy. The upper limb has more rich vascularity and efficient collaterals, small muscle mass, so ischemia time is relatively more. Therefore, the different scoring systems are needed for both. (b) In our case series, MESI scoring was more reliable then MESS score, but this needs a large prospective study to validate it. (c) Salvage should be prime realistic aim influenced by several factors. Prosthesis for upper limb is very expensive and not well tolerated, so even a woody limb is well accepted in our patients.