BASEBALL BAT ASSAULT INJURIES

The baseball bat, according to Baltimore City police crime statistics, is a commonly used weapon. To assess the severity of injuries inflicted by this modern-day club, we retrospectively reviewed 75 charts of patients treated at the University Of Maryland Medical Systems Hospital for baseball bat injuries from January 1990 through July 1991. Multisystem trauma was documented, with craniocerebral injury being the most frequent and the most frequent cause of death. Of the victims struck on the head, 26% sustained an intracranial hemorrhage. In our series, the history of loss of consciousness and the Glasgow Coma Scale score failed to reliably identify the patients with serious injuries. Seventeen percent of our patients with intracranial hemorrhages had both a negative or uncertain history of loss of consciousness and a normal Glasgow Coma Scale score on arrival.