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Low speed aortic injuries

I suspect that many readers will associate traumatic aortic rupture with high energy injuries; at least that is what I was told on courses such as ATLS. However, it appears that we might be mistaken, as data from Sastry et al, who looked at UK serious car accidents suggest that the majority of these devastating injuries occur in low impact collisions. What does this mean for the general emergency physician? I think it means that we cannot use mechanism of injury information to rule out aortic injury and that the dodgy-looking chest x-ray in the patient following a low speed road traffic accident may be more than just a ‘projection problem’ (see page 341).

A new place to ultrasound?

Judging from the papers submitted to the EMJ, emergency ultrasound remains very much in vogue at the moment. Since the initial papers looking at aortic and abdominal scanning we have seen submissions on …

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