Trauma in Ethiopia Revisited: A systematic Review

Background: This is a systematic review on trauma/injury incidents which has tried to examine the variety of socio-demographic, vehicular, environmental, and behavioral factors that are associated with injury and its outcome across different settings.
Data Sources: Electronic searches for trauma/injuries from peer-reviewed literature and websites from 1960 to August 2013.
Study Selection: 36 studies met the study inclusion criteria.
Data Extraction: A systematic narrative summary was conducted that included study design, methodology, risk factors, and other study variables.
Results: A higher proportion of injury was found in economically active age groups of 15-59 years (Range 56.4 %–80%) across all studies. Similarly majority of the articles reported a higher proportion (Mostly 2/3^rd) of injuries among male than female patients (range 53.9 %-91.2 %). Even though in all studies injuries were a concern for every population, some studies [12, 13, 15, and, 29] showed a higher incidence among farmers, students and house wife that other occupation. Unintentional injuries were the primary cause for the majority of injury-related reports made with the weighted pool average percentage of 60.7% (range from 44.6 %¹¹ to 98%²⁰). MVIs were the leading cause of injury among lists of unintentional injuries followed by Falls (16%) machine/tools injury (5.9%), burn (5.3%), poisoning (1.0%) and Animal bite (1.3%). Trauma from interpersonal violence (Homicide) is the leading causes of intentional injury (24.4%) reported followed by disproportionately low incidence of Fire arm(5%) and Self-harm injuries( 2.1%). Nine of the 36 articles reported percentage distribution of Mortality by Mechanism of injury and the rates of death from MVIs and homicide are generally higher with an average weighted pool percentage of 37.5% and 24.1% respectively.
Conclusion: The review showed injury as a significant cause of morbidity and mortality in Ethiopia. Based on the available data, possible strategies relating to trauma prevention are discussed. Because of the uncertainties about the quality and the absence of some data in certain region of Ethiopia, we recommend a need to more accurately define this burden at a national scale.