Surgery

Retrospective study of the clinicopathological abnormalities associated with animal triage score (ATT) in cats after road traffic accidents (RTA).

 

In this retrospective study, the authors looked for associations between worse ATT scores and blood test results to investigate possible prognostic factors in cats.

 

RTA represents 26.3-56.2% of traumatic presentation in cats, making it possibly the most common cause of trauma in this species.

Animal trauma triage (ATT) is a score that can be easily performed on admission based on clinical variables (perfusion, cardiac, respiratory, eye/muscle/integument, skeletal, and neurological). The highest score is 18. In dogs, a cut-off of 5 has shown promising results in terms of the prediction of increased mortality. This study analyses 75 records of cats and divides them into two categories: ATT more than five and ATT less than 5.

In the low ATT group, mortality was 10%, and in the high ATT group was 57.8%. Cats in the high ATT group have lower PCV, lower TP, higher plasma lactate concentration, lower pH, lower plasma bicarbonate concentration, lower base excess, and higher blood glucose concentration (although the magnitude of the differences is not exhaustive).

The main limitations of the study are that ATT was calculated retrospectively and presumably before fluid resuscitation (with the chance that PCV would have been even lower after) and that the majority of cats that died were euthanised for unknown reasons (making assumptions about mortality more challenging).

The paper presents some cat-related considerations of trauma management in the species (lungs prone to injury and species-specific handling of blood glucose) that make it worth a read!

 

Do you find cat trauma difficult? Do you use ATT scores? Come to our Instagram and Facebook page to tell us all about it!