[Impotence in pelvic fractures. Report of 16 cases]

The authors study impotence secondary to a pelvic fracture on the basis of a retrospective series of 16 cases. All these patients had a lesion of the membranous urethra and seven of them underwent a deferred emergency urethral repair. Although the constancy of the urethral lesion is probably related to the fact that this series was recruited from a urology department, impotence is classically considered to be more frequent in the presence of a urethral lesion than in the absence of such a lesion. Two patients presented with incomplete impotence and fourteen with complete impotence. Ten of these sixteen patients spontaneously regained satisfactory erections. When erections were not obtained, the authors analysed the various therapeutic possibilities available, stressing the arterial factor which is usually insufficiently investigated.