BACKGROUND Little focus is on health care disparities in the elderly, a population largely
covered by public insurance. We characterized insurance type and race in elderly trauma
patients to determine if lack of insurance or minority status predict increased mortality.
METHODS The National Trauma Data Bank (version 7.0) was queried for all adult blunt
trauma patients. We divided patients into two cohorts (15–64 or≥ 65 years) based on age
for universal Medicare eligibility. Our primary outcome measure was in-hospital mortality …

''Red cell distribution width is predictive of mortality in trauma patients.''We agree that there
are other common biomarkers, also readily available in clinical practice that may contribute
to mortality prediction in trauma patients. Previously, Dr. Horne, one of our group members,
has shown that the neutrophil-lymphocyte ratio predicts mortality in a population with acute
myocardial infarction. 1 In a similar work, he has used a risk score composed of multiple
components of the complete blood cell count2 and the basic metabolic profile3 to predict …