Swallowing aspects in traumatic brain injury patients

Purpose:  to survey the feeding conditions of people that had a traumatic brain at the time of discharge from hospital; to verify some possible associations between the variables.

Methods:  medical records were collected from 340 patients that were in the Socorrao I hospital in 2004, having traumatic brain injury and remaining under observation for five days or more.

Results:  89.8% patients had left the hospital eating normally by oral way; 7.6% had left the hospital eating by nutritional probe ways, 2.6% had left the hospital with gastrostomy. Most of patients were men with age going from 11 months to 93 years, in average 28.8 years. An association was done between: The kind of food the patient was eating and the time he/she remained in the hospital, emphasizing nutritional oral way with least time in the hospital and a different relationship with who left the hospital and a different relationship with who left the hospital with gastrostomy; Nutritional oral way and age, emphasizing the nutritional oral way associated with the less age; The proceedings while the patient remains in the hospital and how long time he stays there; when the proceedings are harder the patient has to stay longer in the hospital; the hospital time and age, emphasizing that older patients used to stay longer in the hospital.

Conclusion:  this project emphasizes that most of male patients of up to 30-year old. The nutritional oral way was associated with less time in the hospital, when more complex, this made the patients stay more time in hospital, specially with the older patients.

KEYWORDS:
Brain Injuries; Deglutition Disorders; Speech; Language and Hearing Sciences