Cohort Profile: The China Severe Trauma Cohort (CSTC)

Purpose To establish a prospective hospital-based cohort, featured by detailed multidimensional data of trauma patients with active follow-ups, which can be a reliable data source for all studies focusing on the effects or underlying mechanistic pathways of environmental and biological factors on multiple interested trauma-related outcomes, particularly the incidence and trajectory of trauma-related psychopathology, in Chinese population. Methods The China Severe Trauma Cohort (CSTC) enrolled all traumatized individuals aged 12 to 80 years admitted to the Trauma Center of West China Hospital between 1st March 2020 and 8th July 2022. The bio-sample and detailed questionnaire data were collected at recruitment, and phone/internet follow-ups were scheduled at 1-, 3-, 6-, 12-months after the baseline. Long-term health outcomes are planned to be obtained from administrative databases through data linkage. Results A total of 2,500 trauma patients were enrolled (response rate=87.1%) with an average age of 46.01 years, and most of the participants were males(62.6%). The proportions of participants with blood and fecal sample collected at baseline were 93.8% and 66.3%, respectively. Upon 31st August 2022, the follow-up rate was 90.0%, 77.0%, 76.5%, and 89.0% for 1-, 3-, 6-, and 12-months follow-up, respectively. Fall/wrench (47.6%) and traffic accident (26.2%) were the top causes of current trauma. The most common psychopathology at recruitment was sleep disturbance(39.4%), followed by depression(22.6%), anxiety(18.2%), and acute stress reaction(7.8%), all of which showed recovering trajectories during the follow-up period, particularly the first 3 months after baseline. Conclusions CSTC provides a platform with multidimensional data to study both short-term and long-term trauma-related health consequences, prompting early identification and intervention for individuals with high risk of health decline after trauma exposures.