Canadian c-spine criteria and nexus in the spinal trauma: comparison at a tertiary referral hospital in Turkey

Objective: Spinal trauma and the ensuing neurological problems transform a person’s social life and result in significant economic and non-economic burden. We compared the diagnostic performances of the National Emergency X-Radiography Utilization Study (NEXUS) Low-Risk Criteria (NLC) with the Canadian C-Spine Rule (CCSR) criteria in identifying lesions. Methods: This retrospective study was conducted on 724 patients after obtaining approval from the ethical board of the hospital. The demographic characteristics of the patients (age, gender), their medical histories, season, trauma occurrence mechanism, hospital arrival time following the development of spinal trauma, their Glasgow Coma Score at the time of admission, their complaints at the time of admission (such as pain, paresthesia, and loss of muscle strength), their spinal trauma lesion levels, and compatibility of the applied viewing methods with the NEXUS and CCSR criteria were collected from the patients’ files. Results: A total of 2,442 cases were diagnosed with spinal trauma. For patients with a spinal fracture, the sensitivity and specificity of CCSR were 99.7% and 17.9%, respectively, while the sensitivity and specificity of NEXUS were 97.6% and 27.2%, respectively. Positive predictive value (PPV) and negative predictive value (NPV) of CCSR were, respectively, 16.3% and 99.7%, while the PPV and NPV of NEXUS were 17.7% and 98.6%, respectively. Conclusions: This study showed that the CCSR criteria are more sensitive than the Nexus criteria.