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Pediatric Orthopedic Traumatology, as a subspecialty of Orthopedics and Traumatology, has evolved significantly over the past two or three decades and continues to make progress.
Pediatric injuries, due to the rapidly growing skeleton of the patient, have the risk to severely impact lifestyle and mobility despite an extremely favorable healing potential. Therefore, the anatomical features of the child's bone are responsible for the peculiarities of pediatric traumatic injuries and require specific diagnostic methods and treatment options.
The incidence of fractures in pediatric population is about 20 on 1,000 per year, increasing with age; 61% of children's fractures occurs in males (
The epidemiology and distribution of pediatric fractures change over time and are influenced by a multitude of factors including geography, climate, and population characteristics (
In the pediatric age, fractures occur more frequently than in adults. One reason could be related to children and adolescents that are less skilled at-risk assessment. Furthermore, the skeleton is a dynamically growing system, especially in children; bone is less stable, although more elastic, than in adulthood (
The special issue
With regard to diagnostics, the use of computer science is playing an increasingly prominent role. In particular, the dogma that antero-posterior and lateral radiographic projections are necessary to rule out a fracture has been challenged by the advent of new technologies. The use of convolutional neural networks (
Two other articles review the surgical treatment of pediatric femur fractures. One (
Finally, the systematic review on treatment of avulsion fractures of the pelvis in adolescent athletes (
Regarding treatment, interestingly, the authors emphasize the fact that surgery is preferred for major dislocation and fragment size, providing a better return-to-sport rate and decreasing the risk of complications. However, both surgical and conservative treatment provided excellent outcome in most cases.
The Editors of the research topic Upper and Lower Extremity Trauma in Childhood believe that the contents bring new information to a rapidly evolving field of orthopedic trauma.
We hope you enjoy these articles and that they will stimulate further discussion and understanding of pediatric orthopedic traumatology.
FC, AA and VP: research topic editor. All authors contributed to the article and approved the submitted version.
We acknowledge the contributing authors.
The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
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