Report on Decompression Illness, Diving Fatalities - Divers Alert ...

• One case was classified by the chamber as DCS II, even thoughpain was the only symptom. We retained the DCS II classificationbecause the pain had a dermatomal (an area of the skin associatedwith a particular spinal nerve root) distribution suggestive of neurologicaldamage.FinalClassification# Perceived Severity Indexof Serious Cardio- Mild PainCases Neurological Pulmonary NeurologicalDCS I 73 3 70AGE 29 24 1 4DCS II 267 112 8 146 1Lung BT 3 3Ambiguous 42 9 1 22 10Total 414 145 13 175 81It is important to understand all the original data were preserved indigital form as submitted and checked. No data were lost in applyingthe diagnostic criteria described above. These criteria constitutea filter through which the data passed to arrive at the final classificationof Table 2.Table 2Final classificationof injuries retainedfor analysis.2.2 Characteristics of Injured DiversThe age of injured divers varied between 13 and 73 years. The distributionof age by sex is shown in Figure 1. Males made up 69 percentof all injured divers and women 31 percent. This was fairlyconsistent with the sex distribution of previous years. There werefive divers who were 16 years old or younger, comprising about 1percent of the dataset.The median age of the injured divers in 2001 was 38, nearly two yearsolder than in years 1997-2000. The median age of injured females wasthe same as the males, which is also different from previous years,when females tended to be younger. Figure 4 indicates that therewere proportionally more women in the 30-49 age group, andproportionally fewer who were younger than 30 or older than 50.% of Injured Divers454035302520151050285 Males128 Females10-19 20-29 30-39 40-49 50-59 60-69Age (years)Fig 4Age of injureddivers by gender.DAN’s <strong>Report</strong> on Decompression Illness, Diving Fatalities and Project Dive Exploration: 2003 Edition 27