A Public Database on Traumatic Brachial Plexus Injury

Abstract

We hereby present the first worldwide public digital database centred on adult Traumatic Brachial Plexus Injury (TBPI). This initiative aims at reducing distance between clinical and experimental practice and encouraging data sharing and reuse. Detailed electronic questionnaires made with the free software LimeSurvey were designed to collect patients epidemiological, physical and clinical data. The freely available software Neuroscience Experiments System (NES) was employed to support data storage and management. First results of this effort concern data collected from 109 Brazilian adult TBPI patients with varying degrees of functional impairment. The sample is composed by large majority of men (84.4%), mean age of 32.1 (11.3 SD) years old, victims of motorcycle accidents (67%). The similarity of this dataset basic descriptors with those from previous reports in TBPI validates the strategies employed herein. Managing data from diverse provenance in TBPI may allow identifying functional markers related to the patients clinical improvement and foster the development of new investigative tools to unveil its mechanisms.