**3. Prognostic factors of liver injury in polytraumatic patients**

Based on an analysis of the trauma registry data from the DGU from 1993 to 2005 (n=24,711), the present analyses examined whether the participating liver injury in a polytraumatized patient superproportionally increases the incidence of sepsis and multiorgan failure, and whether survival after polytrauma is definitively decreased when the liver is involved.

It is a standardized and anonymized documentation of severely injured patients at defined phases from time point of accident to hospitals discharge (28). In this analysis the following eligibility criteria were used:


Injury severity score (ISS) and the severity of individual injuries were determined with the 1998 revision of the Abbreviated Injury Scale (AIS), table 1.

The existence of sepsis was defined based on the criteria of Bone et al. (29). The definition of organ failure followed the SOFA score (Sequential Organ Failure Assessment) (30). An individual organ failure was defined by at least 3 SOFA score points; a multi-organ failure (MOF) was defined as simultaneous failure of at least two organs.

All those patients with a documented liver injury (AIS abdomen <3 and AIS liver 2-5) were assigned to the "liver trauma" group. Patients with abdominal injuries (AIS abdomen 2-5 or AIS liver <3) were placed in the "abdominal non-liver injury" group. All remaining patients who had an AIS abdomen or liver <3 were placed in the third "non-abdominal trauma" group (control group). The restriction to cases with ISS ≥16 guaranteed a minimum injury severity of AIS 3 for the primary region in the respective study groups.
