Project 455119

Spinal cord injuries cause life-altering changes in a persons' life, that can even go beyond the loss of movement of their limbs. People with spinal cord injuries are living longer, but because they are living longer, we're starting to see other secondary problems happening. A major problem is that people with spinal cord injuries are losing bone quicker than a person without a spinal cord injury, which can cause the bone to break easily, this is called osteoporosis. In people without a spinal cord injury osteoporosis is usually a concern after the age of 50, but for someone with a spinal cord injury osteoporosis can start to be a problem as early at 35 years of age. Unfortunately, we do not currently know how many people with spinal cord injuries are breaking their bones, or how often. We currently do not know how big of a problem broken bones in people with a spinal cord injury is. This project will be looking to answer the question of how many people with a spinal cord injury in Ontario have broken a bone? Then we will look at the impact of those breaks, by understanding how many bones do these people break; how many of these breaks are because of osteoporosis; how much extra health care do these people need; how much does this cost the healthcare system; and what is the rate of death in people after a spinal cord injury, and does this rate of death change with a broken bone? We will be using data from The Institute of Clinical Evaluative Studies (ICES) for secondary data analysis. We will use a variety of different databases which are created from hospital data to answer these questions. We will use statistical analyses to answer the questions and look at how the statistics change based on sex and gender. We will collaborate with people at the University of Toronto, other universities, and people with a spinal cord injury to answer the questions in a meaningful way. All this information will be publicly available when we are done answering the questions.