European journal of pediatric surgery : official journal of Austrian Association of Pediatric Surgery ... [et al] = Zeitschrift für Kinderchirurgie
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Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is the consequence of external forces that traumatically injure the brain. Closed head injury is common in children and is estimated to result in 650,000 to 1 million emergency department visits annually with approximately 7,400 deaths in the United States. ⋯ The purpose of this article is to review current approaches, recommendations, and guidelines on pediatric head trauma with special emphasis on cCT. Therefore, after an overview on classification and TBI scores, diagnostic imaging, and management rules for clinical important TBI, as well as own experience including remarks on cCT technique will be discussed.
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Thoracic injuries continue to be a leading cause of childhood trauma, despite the government's efforts to curb the scourge of this problem. Our review focuses on the incidence, etiology, and management of thoracic trauma in the pediatric population with reference to the recent experience at our institution in a developing country. ⋯ Thoracic trauma has remained a significant cause of morbidity and mortality in the pediatric population. Concerted effort from governments, civil societies, and the medical profession are needed to address this challenge.
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Nonoperative management (NOM) is considered the standard therapy for clinically stable children with blunt solid organ injuries (SOI) grade I to IV. The capability of angioembolization (AE) to decrease the NOM failure rate in adults with blunt SOI has been demonstrated. The inclusion of AE in the pediatric SOI management is rarely reported. ⋯ The impact of this interventional approach is situated between the possibility for NOM in the obvious stable child and the need for open surgery in the obvious unstable patient with grade IV to grade V SOI. There is evidence that AE is capable to decrease the failure rate and complications in the NOM. Although available data are based on cohort studies rather than prospective randomized-controlled trials, we conclude, AE represents a safe and effective therapy and should be part of the interdisciplinary trauma management protocol for SOI in children and adolescents.
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Over the past few decades, important milestones have been reached in the field of skin tissue engineering, bringing the ultimate goal of fabricating an autologous dermoepidermal skin substitute with all its cellular components and skin appendages closer to reality. Yet, scientific progress alone is not enough, clinical demands must be addressed and commercial interests need to be fulfilled. This review gives an overview of commercially available skin substitutes for skin replacement therapies and an insight into the recent development of an autologous full-thickness skin substitute that can readily be transplanted in large quantities onto the patient.
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This article narrates the thrilling story of how the pathogenetic understanding of myelomeningocele was fundamentally revised during the last decades and how these new insights, in particular the "two-hit hypothesis," have prepared the terrain for human fetal surgery. Formerly, the devastating cluster of neurologic and neurogenic problems was mainly attributed to the primary malformation, that is, failure of neurulation. At present, there is solid evidence that in early gestation the nonneurulated spinal cord functions well, but suffers from progressive traumatic and degenerative damage in later gestation because it is openly exposed to the amniotic cavity. ⋯ This article then details how human fetal surgery started in the late 1990s and follows the evolution from the pioneer case studies via the first case series providing encouraging results to the ground breaking Management of Myelomeningocele Study Trial, published in The New England Journal of Medicine in February 2011 by Adzick et al, that has, for the first time, generated unequivocal evidence that patients with prenatal repair do significantly better than those with postnatal care only. Finally, this review looks at several other critical issues, including the hitherto immature endoscopic approach to fetal repair, some future directions of research and clinical practice, and also utters a plea for concentration of these equally rare and complex cases to a few truly qualified centers worldwide. The conclusion derived from all data existing today is that maternal-fetal surgery, although not a cure and not free of risks, represents a novel standard of care for select mothers and their fetuses suffering from one of the most ruinous nonlethal congenital malformations.