Brachial Artery Injury With a Proximal Humerus Fracture in a 10-Year-Old Girl
Abstract not available. Introduction provided instead.
Proximal humerus fractures in children are uncommon; their incidence is 1.2 to 4.4 per 1000 per year or fewer than 5% of all pediatric fractures.1 Nearly all these fractures are treated conservatively because of the potential to heal and remodel without significant residual functional deficits.2,3 Pediatric orthopedic textbooks describe complications associated with proximal humerus fractures, but none of those reviewed describes a concomitant vascular injury.1,4 To our knowledge, there
have been only 2 published reports of such an injury, and both involved a Salter-Harris type II fracture of the proximal humerus and associated vascular injury.5,6
In this article, we describe the presentation, evaluation, and treatment of a 10-year-old girl with an extraphyseal proximal humerus metaphyseal fracture and brachial artery injury—an injury constellation that to our knowledge has not been reported before. A vascular injury associated with a proximal humerus fracture secondary to blunt trauma is uncommon even in adults, and we review the
literature on this uncommon injury in both the adult and the pediatric population.
