RESEARCH ARTICLE
Epidemiology of Surgically Managed Mandibular Condylar Fractures at a Tertiary Referral Hospital in Urban Southwest China
Swosti Thapa*, Jun Wang, Hong-Tao Hu, Fu-Gui Zhang, Ping Ji
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2017Volume: 11
First Page: 294
Last Page: 300
Publisher ID: TODENTJ-11-294
DOI: 10.2174/1874210601711010294
Article History:
Received Date: 08/02/2017Revision Received Date: 31/03/2017
Acceptance Date: 15/05/2017
Electronic publication date: 30/06/2017
Collection year: 2017
open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode. This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
Background:
Mandibular condylar fracture is one of the commonest maxillofacial fractures treated by maxillofacial surgeons. Demography of the patients, causation, and characteristics of the fracture depends on various socio-economic factors. Hence, maxillofacial surgeons should be familiar with epidemiology of mandibular condylar fracture.
Objective:
This study retrospectively describes the demography, etiology, fracture characteristics, and hospital utilization of surgically treated mandibular condylar fractures in a tertiary referral hospital in urban China in past five years.
Methods:
Data of all patients who underwent surgical management between 2011 and 2015 were collected. This included aetiology, characteristics of fracture, time, age, sex, associated injuries, and hospital utilization of 166 patients with 208 mandibular condylar fractures. These patients had undergone open reduction and internal fixation with either miniplates or lag screws. Among the fracture of head of mandibular condyle, 21.28% of the patients had the fracture segments removed. These data were statistically analyzed to describe the epidemiology of mandibular condylar fracture.
Results:
Most of the patients had unilateral mandibular condylar fractures (74.7%). Male patients (76.51%) outnumbered female patients (23.49%) in this cohort. The average age of the patients was 37 years. The fractures were mostly caused by fall from height (60.84%) and were located at the condylar neck (53.61%). Most of the patients had other associated maxillofacial injuries (71.08%) which were mostly located at symphysis and parasymphysis (44.59%). It took 12.58 +/- 0.35 days of hospitalization for the treatment.
Conclusion:
Fall from height was the most prevalent cause of mandibular condylar injury in mountainous urban China. The people at highest risk were middle-aged men. Mandibular condylar fracture was mostly located at the condylar neck and was usually associated with fracture at the symphysis and parasymphysis.
