A case of thoracic aortic injury caused by multiple rib fractures

Thoracic aortic injury is fatal but rare in blunt chest trauma, which usually requires urgent surgical treatment. It is mostly caused by posterior rib fractures. Chest wall stabilization (CWS) has been widely performed in patients with multiple rib fractures all over the world in the past two decades with satisfactory outcomes. However, the surgical treatment of posterior rib fracture within 2-3 cm from transverse process is still a difficult problem for thoracic surgeons. Under this circumstance, rib-transverse process internal fixation method was developed and widely performed for above patients at present. In this article, we presented a case of thoracic aortic injury caused by multiple rib fractures. A 54-year-old female was admitted to our hospital with dyspnea and severe chest pain caused by a falling object. Thoracic aortic injury with multiple rib fractures were diagnosed basing on image date and emergency CWS was performed for this patient. Rib-transverse process internal fixation was not performed in this case since the patients combined with transverse process fracture. We firstly performed transverse process resection combined with CWS for this patient. The results of our study showed this method is safe and feasible for patients with multiple rib fractures combined with transverse process fracture.