Splenic Trauma

Abstract

The spleen is one of the most frequently injured solid organs in blunt abdominal trauma [1]. In the history of trauma care, however, injuries of the spleen have received but scant attention compared to those of the liver and the kidney. Splenectomy has long been the preferred and standard treatment for bleeding from the spleen caused by blunt trauma, because the spleen was regarded as to have no vital function [2]. Owing to the pioneering article of King and Schumacher on the correlation between asplenia and overwhelming infection, the role of the spleen as an immunologic organ particularly in children, came to be widely recognized in the 1960s [3-6]. Then, splenic preservation treatment such as splenorrhaphy, partial splenectomy, and splenic embolisation, became the optimal management techniques for blunt splenic injury [7,8]. Due to the advances in CT imaging and angiography, nonoperative management (NOM) became the optimal management techniques for blunt splenic injury, and splenic embolisation is a valuable adjunct to the NOM [9,10].

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