The pre-eminence of trauma as a cause of death in young adults in the United Kingdom is well established, but little is known about the temporal distribution of these deaths.1 The only complete data are from a frequently quoted paper, in which Trunkey described trauma deaths in San Francisco over two years.2 These data are nearly two decades old and come from a country where the causes of trauma and the system for dealing with it differ from those in the United Kingdom.
All patients aged over 12 who died after trauma in the Lothian and Borders regions of Scotland between 1 February 1992 and 31 January 1994 were studied prospectively by the Scottish Trauma Audit Group and …