1B management of specific fractures Flashcards
What is trauma?
Emergency broken bone support
What are the main principles of dealing with trauma in hospitals?
- Advanced trauma life support
- Reduce fracture
- Hold fracture
- Rehabilitate (move) when fracture is healed
What is orthopaedics?
More longer term conditions e.g. osteoarthritis
What are the principles for orthopaedics?
- History and examination
- look → feel → move
- Investigations
What are the clinical signs of a fracture?
- Pain
- Swelling
- Crepitus
- Deformity
- Adjacent structural injury: nerves/vessels/ligament/tendons
How do we investigate fractures?
- Radiograph (Xray)- most popular
- CT scan
- MRI scan
- Bone scan
How do we describe radiographs?
- Location- which bone and which part of bone?
- Pieces- simple/multifragmentary?
- Pattern- transverse/oblique/spiral
- Displaced/undisplaced
- Translated/angulated?
- X/Y/Z plane
What are the two types of movements we can have of bones?
- Translation
- Angulation
What direction is translation?
Straight line movements where you can have:
- medial and lateral translation
- proximal and distal translation
- anterior and posterior translation
What direction is angulation movement?
Rotation movements:
- Varus/valgus movement is in coronal plane towards and away from midline
- Dorsal/volar movement is in sagittal plane
- Internal/external rotation is in axial plane
What are general complications of fractures (early or late)?
- Fat embolus
- DVT
- Infection
- Prolonged immobility (UTI, chest infections, sores)
What are some more specific complications of fractures?
- Neurovascular injury
- Muscle/tendon injury
- Non union/mal union
- Local infection
- Degenerative change (intraarticular)
- Reflex sympathetic dystrophy
What are some causes of neck of femur (NOF) fractures?
- Osteoporosis in older patients
- Trauma in younger patients
- Combination of both
What do we want to know about in the patient’s history when looking at NOF fractures?
- Age
- Comorbidities- cardiovascular/respiratory/diabetes/cancer
- Preinjury mobility- were they independent/shopping/walking/sports?
- Social Hx: relatives? do they have stairs at home? ETOH?
What is the red dotted line?
- The attachment of the capsule along the intertrochanteric line on the front line
- On the back of the femur the capsule goes halfway up NOF
- Anything above dotted line is intracapsular and everything below it is extracapsular (there’s a half zone on the back where it’s extracapsular there but around the front it’s intracapsular)
Identify the types of fractures for each image
- Subcapital (intracapsular)
- Transcervical (extracapsular)
- Intertrochanteric (extracapsular)
- Subtrochanteric (left) and 3 part intertrochanteric (right)
What kind of fracture is in this pic? Is it likely to have interrupted blood supply and what does that mean?
Intracapsular left NOF fracture
Yes so risk of avascular necrosis (death of bone due to lack of blood) is higher
How do we determine whether to either fix or replace a fracture?
- The location of the fracture
- The degree of displacement