Dorsal root ganglion injuries in 109 blunt trauma fatalities

In an autopsy study of 180 cervical spines, 109 were from victims of fatal blunt injury. A search was made for injuries to the dorsal root ganglia. The whole cervical spines, from the skull base to T1, were formalin fixed, deep frozen and sagittally sectioned on a specially adapted band saw in 2.5 mm thick slices. In 15 of the 109 fatally injured individuals, 44 examples of interstitial haemorrhage into a dorsal root ganglion (DRG) were found. This was sometimes accompanied by neural tissue disruption, visible only on histological study. The intraneural DRG haemorrhage was found in 13.8 per cent of all the injured individuals, but this prevalence rose to 34.5 per cent when only those (29) individuals surviving the injury between 2 h and 7 days were considered. The possible relevance of such injuries, in survivors of injury, to acute and chronic pain syndromes is discussed.