What Are The Most Common Causes Of Quadriplegia?

Living life with quadriplegia presents extreme challenges and requires a lifetime of expensive medical care for the afflicted.

Patients who suffer from quadriplegia have paralysis of all four limbs. Patients can develop quadriplegia during birth, a serve accident, or another traumatic injury.

What Is Quadriplegia?

A patient who has quadriplegia has complete paralysis of all four limbs and their torso.

Quadriplegia can occur when a person suffers serious damage to the spinal cord and brain, resulting in paralysis. People with quadriplegia may lose function, sensation, and control of their arms and legs. Without the use of their arms and legs, people cannot walk, feed themselves, change themselves, and become severely limited in most other areas of their day-to-day lives.

What Are The Most Common Causes Of Quadriplegia?

When a person injures any part of their spinal cord or the nerves at the end of the spinal canal, permanent damage can occur. Each year, as many as 500,000 people injure their spinal cords, according to Medical News Today.

Quadriplegia typically results when a person suffers a severe spinal cord injury or damages to the vertebrae, ligaments, or spinal column’s disks. 

When a person suffers a traumatic blow to their spine that results in a fracture, dislocation, or the blows crushes or compresses the spine or one or more of your vertebrae, quadriplegia can result.

What can be so intense to cause this permanent damage to the spinal cord? Some common causes are:

• A car or motorcycle accident
• A sports injury
• A fall
• Knife or gunshot wound
• Alcohol use that results in an injury
• A traumatic birth

Falls cause 31 percent of spinal cord injuries, according to The Mayo Clinic. Sports injuries, such as a bad tackle in football or diving into the shallow end of the pool, account for 10 percent of spinal cord injuries. Violent injuries from gunshots or knife wounds tally 13 percent of spinal cord injuries. Finally, alcohol influences about 1 in 4 spinal cord injuries.

Traumatic accidents represent the top causes of quadriplegia, but genetic diseases can also be the culprit. Conditions such as Multiple Sclerosis (MS) and Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, can also cause quadriplegia. Stroke patients may  develop quadriplegia due to brain damage that stops a person from being able to control their limbs.

Cancer, arthritis, infections, inflammation, or osteoporosis can also cause quadriplegia. In extreme cases, a doctor or hospital staff’s negligence can cause a patient’s paralysis, resulting in quadriplegia. In such cases, the patient or patient’s family may have a medical malpractice claim.

Can I Sue Someone Because I Have Quadriplegia?

If you or a loved one has quadriplegia because of an accident, violent attack, or medical malpractice, you may have grounds for a lawsuit if, among other things:

• A doctor failed to diagnose you or treat your condition and paralysis resulted
• A doctor or hospital staff administered improper or regiment treatment for a curable spinal cord injury
• Preventable complications for an unrelated procedure caused paralysis

If you believe quadriplegia occurred due to negligence on the part of others, you must contact an experienced attorney to represent you right away.

Ross Feller Casey, one of the nation’s top personal injury law firms, has won record-setting, multimillion-dollar verdicts and settlements in quadriplegia lawsuits. The firm has a team of Ivy League-trained doctors right on staff to help successfully litigate these complicated types of cases.

Call our expert quadriplegia lawyers now for a free case evaluation. Ross Feller Casey handles all its cases, including quadriplegia lawsuits, on a contingency basis, so you will not pay a thing until a recovery is made.