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HALIFAX -- People are equally likely to get a traumatic rupture of the thoracic aorta (TRA) during a car accident, despite whether the car is hit on the side or head-on.
The belief has been that TRA is more likely to happen in front-on collisions. Because of this, trauma doctors in emergency may miss the injury in patients whose vehicle was struck from the side, said Dr. Deepak Katyal.
As patients are wheeled into emergency, doctors are given information about the motor vehicle accident (MVA), including the orientation of the vehicle when the patient was injured.
Our mindset is that this injury tends to occur with frontal crashes, but we've shown it occurs in almost equally in lateral (side swipe) and frontal (head-on) crashes," he said at the annual meeting here of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada.
Most people...