Tag Archives: spleen

Abstracts, Solid organ

Best Of AAST 2022 #6: The “Missed” Splenic Pseudoaneurysm

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Like so many things in trauma, there are two camps when it comes to repeat CT scan after solid organ injury: the believers vs the non-believers. In my experience, a minority of US trauma centers incorporate this repeat CT study in their practice guidelines. 

Yet the question keeps coming up in the literature. Earlier this year, I reviewed a paper from the University of Cincinnati from a group of believers. I was not very kind, and you can read the review here. The biggest problem with most believer papers is that they cite very old literature that overstates the incidence of delayed hemorrhage. They then use this to justify an extra CT scan to find more of these “dangerous” pseudoaneurysms. Unfortunately, those old papers are just not very good and many overstate the problem.

So let’s look at this year’s abstract from the LAC+USC group. They open by stating that the natural history is unclear but that “risk for spontaneous rupture and exsanguination exist.” The authors sought to further define the utility of using a delayed CT angiogram (dCTA) in diagnosing and triggering intervention after high-grade blunt solid organ injury.

They performed a retrospective study of all patients arriving at their Level I center over a nearly five year period with a Grade 3 or higher injury to liver, spleen, or kidney. They excluded the young, patients transferred in, early deaths, and patients who underwent immediate operation on their spleen or kidney. The primary outcome was intervention triggered by the dCTA.

Here are the factoids:

  • A total of 349 patients with 395 high grade solid organ injuries were analyzed (42% liver, 30% spleen, 28% kidney)
  • Median injury grade for each organ was 3
  • Initial management was “typically” nonoperative or angioembolization (liver 83%, spleen 95%, kidney 89%)
  • Delayed CT angiogram was typically performed on day 4 and identified a lesion in 16 spleen, 10 liver, and 6 renal injuries
  • The dCTA prompted an intervention in 12 spleen, 8 liver, and 5 kidney injuries

The authors conclude that delayed CTA identified a significant number of vascular lesions requiring endovascular or surgical intervention. They recommend further examination and consideration of universal screening to avoid missing these pesky pseudoaneurysms.

Bottom line: Once again, we have a paper that conflates finding a pseudoaneurysm with the need to get rid of it. Granted, I was always taught that pseudoaneurysms (in adults) found on initial CT required an intervention. In the old days of “delayed splenic rupture” a pseudoaneurysm was the likely culprit. 

But the majority of centers do not go looking for pseudoaneurysms days later. And there are precious few patients coming back with delayed hemorrhage after discharge. So what gives?

Could it be that there is a difference between a “fresh” pseudoaneurysm and a “delayed” one? Perhaps the fresh ones portend a real risk of bleeding, but delayed ones are just a normal part of the healing process and rarely bleed? We just don’t know for sure.

This paper shows that if you look for a delayed pseudoaneurysm you will find them. And at this center, if you find them you will be compelled to angioembolize or even operate on them. Yet we really don’t know if that is necessary. It certainly adds to length of stay and hospital charges.

My take is that we desperately need a broad tally of patients discharged with a liver or spleen injury who return within a few weeks for bleeding complications. I would exclude kidneys because they act so differently. And I would not look at all returns because most liver injury readmissions are for bile problems. Just focus on readmissions for bleeding. Once we see what the real incidence is, we can decide whether these pseudoaneurysms are a problem significant enough to pursue with delayed scans, etc.

Here are my questions for the authors and presenter:

  1. What is your assessment of the incidence of delayed rupture and exsanguination? Have you read through the old papers in detail to assure yourselves that they are actually correct?
  2. Do you hold patients in the hospital for their delayed CT angiogram? The studies were typically performed on days 3-7. Do you really keep your solid organ injured patients in the hospital that long? At our center, a grade 3 injury could be discharged home in two days!
  3. How do you decide to take a patient to interventional radiology or the OR after the delayed CT? Is it an unwritten rule? It seemed like most, but not all, had some type of intervention. A (very) few had the lesion but nothing was done. Please explain the difference.

This is an interesting paper just because of the intuitive leap it makes from pseudoaneurysm to intervention. I’m anticipating your presentation so I can hear all the details.

Reference: PSEUDOANEURYSMS AFTER HIGH GRADE BLUNT SOLID ORGAN INJURY AND THE UTILITY OF DELAYED CT ANGIOGRAPHY. Plenary paper #34, AAST 2022.

Abdomen, Solid organ

Surveillance For Splenic Pseudoaneurysm After Injury

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When it comes to repeat CT scanning after splenic injury, there are believers and there are non-believers. In my experience, the majority of centers in the US are non-believers. However, there is a new paper in press that attempts to convince us that more should become believers.

I think the biggest lesson to be learned from this paper is that WE SHOULD READ THE ENTIRE PAPER before drawing conclusions. I have said this in the past and I will say it again. In this case, not only did I read the entire paper, but I had to dig deep into the references it cited as well.

Nonoperative management of splenic injuries has a very high success rate if done properly. Some papers claim this can be up to 93%, which parallels my experience. This success rate involves excluding unstable patients (they need to be in the operating room) and planned use of angioembolization in select patients. Over the years we have found that we need to do less and less in the management of solid organ injury patients:

  • No bedrest
  • No starvation (NPO status)
  • No serial blood draws
  • No repeat CT scan
  • Few limitations on activity after discharge

For an example of a practice guideline that demonstrates that less is more, use the download link at the end of this post.

But back to the question about repeat CT scanning before discharge. Why do we need to do this? The usual reason is that “we want to find delayed pseudoaneurysms.” And why is that important? “It might bleed!”

Really? Let’s look into that through the lens of this new paper by the group at the University of Cincinnati. They performed a retrospective study of their experience with patients who had sustained blunt splenic injury during a recent three-year period. They were interested in how many underwent splenectomy or splenorrhaphy, who had repeat CT imaging, who went to interventional radiology (IR) and when, and which ones were found to have pseudoaneurysms and what was done about it.

Here are the factoids:

  • There were 539 patients who met inclusion criteria, with an average ISS of 24
  • Of these, 46 died during their hospital stay (none from their splenic injury)
  • Focusing on the 248 patients with higher grade injuries (III-V), 125 (50%) underwent emergent or delayed splenectomy. Early vs late operation was not broken out, but this is a startlingly high number!
  • Of the higher grade injured patients who kept their spleens, 97% underwent repeat CT around day 5
  • Delayed pseudoaneurysms were detected in the following patients:
    • Grade III: 10 of 88 patients (11%). Then 8 of those 10 went to IR, and 5  of 10 had splenectomy!
    • Grade IV: 7 of 24 (29%).  Then 8 of the 7 (error in the paper?) went to IR and 3 of 7 had splenectomy!
    • Grade V: 2 of 5 (40%). Both of these patients went to IR and somehow kept their spleens.

The authors conclude that routine followup CT imaging identifies splenic pseudoaneurysms allowing for interventions to minimize delayed complications.

Bottom line: Whoa! There’s a lot going on here. My first observation is that this center does a lot of splenectomies! Of the 539 patients (all comers) who were included in the study, 129 (24%)  lost their spleens. If grade I-II injuries are excluded that percent rises to 50%!

Only eight splenectomies were performed after the repeat CT. This would imply that there were either a lot of unstable patients with splenic injury, the institutional indications for this procedure arbitrarily include grade, or there is a lot of variability in the decision to perform it.

I think there are really two questions to answer here. 

  1. Does delayed splenic pseudoaneurysm occur? The answer is yes. There are a few studies (performed by believers) that demonstrate new pseudoaneurysms after repeat CT. I’m convinced.
  2. Do we care? The real question is, do these pseudoaneurysms cause harm? The fear is that they might explode at some point after patient discharge and cause a major problem.

Papers written by the believers cite a number of old studies and give numbers between 2% and 27% for incidence of delayed hemorrhage. Well, I tracked down all of these papers, including the ones they cited. And it doesn’t add up.

  • One paper from a believer institution found no delayed bleeds.
  • Several papers were for pediatric patients, whose spleens don’t behave like adult ones. They found one case after discharge in one out of 276 patients across three studies.
  • Of 76 adolescents, none encountered delayed bleeds

Many of the papers cited regarding bleeding complications are very old. CT scanners had less resolution, and in many papers, IR was not even a consideration. 

So here’s my take. Yes, delayed pseudoaneurysms occur. In children we don’t care. They almost never cause a problem. But in adults, they can and do cause issues and should be embolized shortly after the initial scan. 

Once embolized, the ones seen on that initial scan are effectively neutralized and do not need a repeat scan. The small ones that might pop up later may very well be part of the healing process. And they may not even occur if angioembolization is done early. It seems unlikely that anything further is needed.

But remember, clinical judgement trumps all. If your patient starts complaining of new abdominal symptoms while in the hospital or after discharge, get a prompt CT scan to rule out any developing complications.

Sample solid organ injury protocol: click here

Reference: Delayed splenic pseudoaneurysm identification with surveillance imaging. J Trauma Acute Care Surg. 2022 Mar 22. doi: 10.1097/TA.0000000000003615. Epub ahead of print. PMID: 35319540.

 

Solid organ

Does Time To Interventional Radiography Make a Difference In Solid Organ Injury?

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Solid organ injury is one of the more common manifestations of blunt abdominal trauma. Most trauma centers have some sort of practice guideline for managing these injuries. Frequently, interventional radiology (IR) and angioembolization (AE) are part of this algorithm, especially when active bleeding is noted on CT scan.

So it makes sense that getting to IR in a timely manner would serve to stop the bleeding sooner and help the patient. But in most hospitals, interventional radiology is not in-house 24/7. Calls after hours require mobilization of a call team, which may be costly and take time.

For this reason, it is important to know if rapid access to angioembolization makes sense. Couldn’t the patient just wait until the start of business the next morning when the IR team normally arrives?

The group at the University of Arizona at Tucson tackled this problem. They performed a 4-year retrospective review of the TQIP database. They included all adult patients who underwent AE within four hours of admission. Outcome measures were 24-hour mortality, blood product usage, and in-hospital mortality.

Here are the factoids:

  • Out of over a million records in the database, only 924 met the inclusion criteria
  • Mean time to AE was 2 hours and 22 minutes, with 92% of patients getting this procedure more than an hour after arrival
  • Average 24-hour mortality was 5%. Mortality by hours to AE was as follows:
    • Within 1 hour: 2.6%
    • Within 2 hours: 3.6%
    • Within 3 hours: 4.0%
    • Within 4 hours: 8.8%
  • There was no difference in the use of blood products

The authors concluded that delayed angioembolization for solid organ injury is associated with increased mortality but no increase in blood product usage. They recommend that improving time to AE is a worthy performance improvement project.

Bottom line: This study has the usual limitations of a retrospective database review. But it is really the only way to obtain the range of data needed for the analysis. 

The results seem straightforward: early angioembolization saves lives. What puzzles me is that these patients should be bleeding from their solid organ injury. Yet longer delays did not result in the use of more blood products.

There are two possibilities for this: there are other important factors that were not accounted for, or the sample size was too small to identify a difference. As we know, there are huge variations in how clinicians choose to administer blood products. This could easily account for the apparent similarities between products given at various time intervals to AE.

My advice? Act like your patient is bleeding to death. If the CT scan indicates that they have active extravasation, they actually are. If a parenchymal pseudoaneurysm is present, they are about to. So call in your IR team immediately! Minutes count!

Reference: Angioembolization in intra-abdominal solid organ injury:
Does delay in angioembolization affect outcomes?  J Trauma 89(4):723-729, 2020.

Abstracts, Solid organ

Best of AAST #12: Embolization Of Splenic Pseudoaneurysm

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The management of blunt spleen injury has evolved significant over the time I’ve been in practice. Initially, the usual formula was:

Spleen injury = splenectomy

This began to change in the late 1980’s, and beginning in the early 90’s nonoperative management became the rage. We spent the next 10-15 years tweaking the details, gradually reducing bed rest and NPO times, and increasing the success rate through smart patient selection and discovering new adjuncts.

One of these adjuncts was angiography with embolization. The ShockTrauma Center in Maryland was an early adopter and protocolized its use in patients with high-grade injuries.

But now, they are questioning the utility of this tool in certain patients: those with splenic pseudoaneurysms (PSA). They theorized that modern, high resolution CT identifies relatively unimportant pseudoaneurysms. They conducted a 5-year retrospective review of their experience.

Here are the factoids:

  • They identified 717 splenic injuries, of whom 155 were embolized but only 140 patients had adequate records and imaging for review
  • The majority of patients had high grade injury: 31% Grade 3, 61% Grade 4, 1% Grade 5
  • Extravasation was seen in 17% and PSA in 52%
  • About 44% of patients went to angiography within 6 hours, but the mean was 17 hours indicating quite a few outliers
  • Among the 73 patients with an initial PSA , a third of them did not have a detectable lesion during angiography
  • Patients who underwent embolization for PSA had a followup CT 48-72 hours afterwards, persistently perfused PSA were seen in 40% (!)
  • No patients with PSA who were only observed required delayed splenectomy

The authors conclude that a third of pseudoaneurysms may be clinically insignificant, and that 40% of them persist after embolization. They do not, however, offer any recommendations based on their data.

Here are my comments: This is an interesting study. My read of the abstract and slides would indicate that this group routinely sends all Grade 3 and 4 injuries to angio, and Grade 5 could go to either angio or OR. They take their good time going to interventional radiology (mean 17 hours from arrival), and get a routine followup CT 48-72 hours from hitting the door if they didn’t go to the OR.

If I were to play the devil’s advocate, I might think that interventional radiology was being de-emphasized for some reason. Was there some reluctance to send patients there, or limited availability? This might explain the long access times. And how are the radiologists not shutting down 40% of PSA that are seen?

I am intrigued by the study, but there are a lot more details needed to get some good takeaways from it.

Here are my questions for the presenter and authors:

  • Please explain why it takes so long to send patients to angiography. Less than half got there in less than 6 hours, and the mean of 17 hours means that many didn’t get there until the next day.
  • Does this small study have the statistical power to say that some PSA are benign? The groups are very small, and I would speculate that the group size needed to show significance is in the high hundreds.
  • What was the reason for splenectomy in the 2 patients who underwent embolization? Was it related to the pseudoaneurysm or something else?
  • How can you be sure that these PSA are insignificant? Frequently, pseudoaneurysms don’t explode for 7-10 days. Do you have any data on patients who returned to a hospital with delayed bleeding?
  • If you believe that many pseudoaneurysms are benign, how do you propose to manage the patients? Observe until they explode? Repeat a contrast CT scan, with the associated contrast and radiation re-dose? And how long would you wait to do this? What would your new protocol be?

I’ll be all ears on Friday when this abstract is presented live.

Abdomen

Activity Guidelines After Solid Organ Injury: How Important Are They?

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Just about every practice guideline out there regarding liver and spleen injury has some type of physical activity guidelines associated with it. The accepted dogma is that moving around too much, or climbing stairs, or lifting objects, or getting tackled while playing rugby could exacerbate the injury and lead to complications or surgery.

But is it true? Activity restrictions after solid organ injury have been around longer than I have been a trauma surgeon. And the more people I poll on what they do, the more and very different answers I get. And there are no decent papers published that look critically at this question. Until now. 

A pediatric multi-center study of study on adherence to activity restrictions was published last year. Ten Level I pediatric trauma centers in the US tabulated their experience with solid organ injuries over a 3.75 year period fro 2013 to 2016. Only patients with successful nonoperative management of their injury were included, and those with high grade renal or pancreatic injuries were excluded.

Since this was a pediatric study, the American Pediatric Surgical Association (APSA) practice guideline was followed (activity restriction = organ injury grade + 2 weeks). Activity restrictions included all sports, any recreational activity with wheels, or any activity that involved having both feet off the ground. Patients with Grade III-V injuries were seen at an office visit after 2 weeks, and lower grade injuries had a phone followup.

Adherence to guidelines was assessed by a followup phone call two months after injury. Clinical outcomes assessed at 60 days included unplanned return to the emergency department (ED), re-admission, complications, and development of new bleeding confirmed by surgery, ultrasound, or computed tomography (CT) at 60 days post injury.

Here are the factoids:

  • Of the 1007 patients in the study, some 56% were either excluded (178) or lost to followup (463)
  • Of the remaining 366, roughly 46% had a liver injury, 44% spleen, and the remaining 10% had both
  • Median age was 10, so this was actually a younger population
  • 76% of patients claimed they abided by the guidelines, 14% said they did not, and 10% “didn’t know.” This means they probably did not.
  • For the 279 patients who said they adhered to activity restrictions 13% returned to the ED and half were admitted to the hospital
  • Of the 49 patients who admitted they did not follow the guidelines, 8% returned to the ED at some point and none were readmitted
  • The most common reasons for return to ED were abdominal pain, anorexia, fatigue, dizziness, and shoulder pain
  • There were no delayed operations in either of the groups

Bottom line: There were no significant differences between the compliant and noncompliant groups. Unfortunately, the authors did not include an analysis of the “I don’t know if I complied” group, which would have been interesting. But there is one issue I always worry about in these low-number-of-subjects studies that don’t show a significant difference between groups. Did they have the statistical power to show such a difference? If not, then we still don’t know the answer. And unfortunately, I’m not able to guess the numbers well enough to do the power calculation for this study.

I am still intrigued by this study! Our group originally had a fixed time period (6 weeks) of limited activity in our practice guideline for pediatric solid organ injury patients. This was rescinded last year based on our experience of no delayed complications and guidance from our sister pediatric trauma center at Children’s Hospital in Minneapolis. We are also moving toward making a similar change on our adult practice guideline.

Too many centers wait too long to make changes in their practice guidelines. They bide their time waiting for new, published research that they can lean on for their changes. Unfortunately, I think they will be waiting for a long time because many of our questions are not interesting enough for acceptance by the usual journals. Rely on the expertise and experience of your colleagues and then make those changes. Be sure to follow with your performance improvement program to make sure that they actually do work as well as you think!

Reference: Adherence to APSA activity restriction guidelines and 60-day clinical outcomes for pediatric blunt liver and splenic injuries (BLSI). J Ped Surg 54:335-339, 2019.