Assessment of Cost-Effectiveness of Computerized Cranial Tomography in Children with Mild Head Trauma

Pediatric head traumas constitute the majority of admissions to emergency departments (ED) due to trauma. This study aims to draw attention to the use of cranial computerized tomography (CT) scans in the evaluation of children with head trauma under the age of 18, and to determine CT scans' usefulness in terms of cost-effectiveness.

Age, gender, mechanism of trauma and Glasgow Coma Scale (GCS), diagnosis, time of admission to hospital, hospitalization and operation, cranial computerized tomography and hospitalization costs of all cases were retrospectively analyzed.

A total of 26,412 patients younger than 18 years old who were admitted to the emergency department due to head trauma and who had a cranial tomography were analyzed. They had a mean age of 7.74 ± 5.66 years. In total, 26,363 (99.8%) of these patients had a GCS greater than 14. Out of these patients, only 402 (1.5%) had brain injury revealed by cranial CT, 41 (0.2%) of these patients were operated and 3 of the patients lost their lives. The total cost of patients admitted to the emergency department with a head injury amounts to USD 583,317. Furthermore, 75.78% of this cost comes from negative cranial CTs. A cost analysis according to different age groups did not show a meaningful difference between 0-2 years and 3-5 years (p = 1.000), but there was a meaningful difference for all the other age groups.

Our findings show that applying algorithms to predict traumatic brain injury in children with mild head injury rather than scanning all patients with cranial CT will enable more reliable and cost-effective patient care. Current practices should be reviewed to avoid unnecessary radiation exposure and expense in the ED. It is also necessary to inform and educate parents about the risk/benefit ratio of cranial CT scans.