Grant: U.S. Army Medical Research and Materiel Command 2009 - 2013. Awarded to the American Burn Association, subawarded the Arizona Burn Center.
Project: “Development of an Inhalation Injury Scoring System to Predict Severity of Inhalation Injury.” $1,035,968
Goal
Develop a standardized scoring system for inhalation injury that can be used both to quantify and predict severity of inhalation injury in adults over 18 years of age.
Hypothesis
We can develop a model based on clinical, radiographic, bronchoscopic, and biochemical parameters that will predict the severity of inhalation injury with greater than 80% predictive accuracy.
Specific Aims
- Construction of a formula that depends on readily available demographic, clinical and laboratory parameters, all of which can be measured either at military medical outposts of Level II or greater or at any civilian burn center in North America.
- Delineation of acceptable clinical definitions of the severity of smoke inhalation injury, differentiating “mild”, “moderate” and “severe” inhalation injury using a multivariate construct of clinical outcomes such as duration of intubation, length of stay (both ICU and hospital), and number of episodes of pneumonia, ALI, and ARDS.
- Evaluation of the predictive accuracy of this formula within several large burn centers so that universality of application is guaranteed.
Technical Objectives
- Identify patient, demographic, clinical, and laboratory characteristics of burn patients that correlate with the severity of inhalation injury compared to burn patients without inhalation injury.
- Use these identified characteristics to develop a predictive model for the grading of inhalation injury severity.
- Identify potential biomarkers that may be translated into clinical therapy to decrease the severity of inhalation injury.
- Develop methodology for the rapid identification of inhalation injury to facilitate triage in mass casualty and combat settings.