Spinal cord injury, Australia, 2005-06

Raymond A Cripps

November 2007
Australian Institute of Health and Welfare
Canberra
AIHW cat. no. INJCAT 102

Severe spinal cord injury (SCI) is a very debilitating injury.

This report presents information from the Australian Spinal Cord Injury Register (ASCIR) on 374 newly incident cases from trauma and disease in the year 2004-05. During the year, 284 new cases of SCI from traumatic causes were registered in Australia, an age-adjusted incidence rate of 15.7 cases per million population. The most common clinical outcome of SCI was incomplete tetraplegia (93 cases).

Transport related injuries (46%) and falls (33%) accounted for over three-quarters of the 284 cases of traumatic SCI. Cases also occurred during sport (n=35) and working for income, including travel to and from work (n=43). Falling was the most common type of event leading to traumatic SCI at older ages.

The ASCIR is a collaborative activity of the AIHW National Injury Surveillance Unit and all of the specialist units in Australia.

The report is available as a PDF document (~ 1253 Kb).

Notes and corrections:

Note: Minor errors were found to affect some values in the original version of this publication, which have been corrected in this release. The opportunity was taken to make some changes to the text, mainly for clarity. The main findings remain unchanged. The previous version is available here

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