Right atrial rupture due to blunt chest trauma

Violent injury currently accounts for the majority of deaths among young people. Cardiac trauma is responsible for 15% of deaths from thoracic injury, and the incidence of cardiac injury in blunt chest trauma is as high as 76% in some clinical series. Many of these cardiac injuries consist of myocardial contusions. Recently, however, there has been increasing recognition of chamber disruption caused by blunt chest trauma. Cardiac injury is usually the result of direct compression of the heart between the sternum and the dorsal spine. These patients are frequently in extremis, with signs of pericardial tamponade, hypotension, and/or massive hemothorax. Successful management is dependent upon prompt diagnosis and surgical repair. To date there have been only 28 survivors (including the three patients in this report) of this catastrophic and frequently unrecognized injury.