April 2016, episode 52

Welcome to the April issue of the Journal. The lead paper is by Dr. Junichi Inoue and colleagues from the Tokyo Medical University who analyze the Japan Trauma Data Bank to determine the impact of REBOA. REBOA has been used in Japan since 1990 and the national data bank was established in 2003. The next paper is by Dr. Vicente Undurraga and colleagues from the PROPPR group. In this subgroup the authors selected patients requiring emergency laparotomy, defined as within 90 minutes of hospital arrival, with the hypothesis that this high risk group would be most likely to benefit from an initial 1:1:1 transfusion strategy. The next paper by Dr. Shibani Pati and colleagues from the University of California at San Francisco and colleagues from Portland and Houston, examine the type of plasma to deliver to attenuate the endotheliopathy of trauma. Finally, I believe another timely report is by Dr. James Byrne and associates from the University of Toronto who analyze the impact of EMS prehospital times on trauma center outcome. The authors linked EMS data from the National EMS Information System to trauma centers using ACS TQIP by destination zip code.