Objective: To determine the variables associated with nursing diagnoses in patients with polytrauma treated in an emergency. Method: correlational descriptive design; the sample consisted of 105 patients to whom a questionnaire of sociodemographic and clinical variables was applied and a checklist “Nur-sing diagnoses of patients with polytrauma” (reliability 0.94). Results: The majority of patients were young, single men, with secondary education and independent work. The median time of stay was 04 hours. The most frequent cause of polytrauma was traffic accidents, mild polytraumatism predominated. Twelve real nursing diagnoses were identified corresponding to six domains, the most affected being the Com-fort domain (97.1% “Acute Pain”), Coping / stress tolerance (89.5 % “Anxiety”), Activity / rest ( 58 % “Impaired physical mobility”). Regarding the risk diagnoses, the most affected domain was Safety / Protection (“Risk of Infection” and “Risk of peripheral neurovascular dysfunction”). Conclusions: The heart rate was the variable that showed greater association and direct strength with the number of diagnoses (r = 0.506). The diagnosis “decrease in cardiac ou-tput” correlated positively with all the nursing diagnoses identified, being stronger and more direct with the diagnoses “ineffective respiratory pattern” (r = 0.783) and “deteriora-tion of spontaneous ventilation” (r = 0.748).