In Small Bowel Obstruction, Sometimes Surgery Is Not to Blame

Intestinal injury from blunt abdominal trauma is well known, and the treatment trend is to manage such patients nonsurgically. These authors report on five patients (age range, 3–10 years) with histories of nonoperatively managed blunt abdominal trauma who later underwent surgery for small bowel obstruction at a pediatric tertiary care center in Australia.

The patients had experienced the trauma from 13 days to 1 year before presentation with small bowel obstruction; three had seat belt bruising from automobile accidents, one had injury from a bicycle handlebar, and another was injured from a collapsed brick wall. The first three patients underwent abdominal CT scans at the time of the trauma.

Patients underwent surgery when they presented wi…