A Practical Burn Severity Index

Abstract

The purpose of this investigation is to develop a simple and clinically useful system for measuring severity of burn injury. A five-variable scale consisting of sex of patient, age, presence of inhalation injury, presence of full-thickness burn, and percent of total body surface area burned that predicted to death was derived from multivariate logistic regression. A simplified version of this scale demonstrated predictive power for classifying patients according to their risk. This simplified scale was subsequently validated to another sample of burn patients.