Background
Comparing to male urethra, female urethra with an average length of 4 cm is much shorter and less fixed in the pelvic, thus the chance of getting injured is low. Although pelvic fracture urethral and bladder injuries in girls are rare, the management is complex. Unlike male patients, there is no standard treatment for female pelvic fracture urethral injury and the surgical management in published literature remains controversial because the morbidity of postoperative incontinence and stricture were still high. Hence in this article, we introduced 5 cases of girls with intensive bladder neck avulsion and urethral rupture associated with pelvic fracture and elaborated our surgical technique of bladder flap bladder neck reconstruction.
Discussion
Female urethral injuries caused by pelvic fracture is a rare occurrence because the female urethral is short and has a good mobility in the pelvic. As for children, the skeletally immature pelvis is more plastic and flexible because there is a more percentage of cartilage, a more porous cortical bone, and the pubic symphysis and sacroiliac joints are more elastic [
1], hence the pelvic absorbs higher energy during trauma. Also, girl’s bladder neck and urethra are more vulnerable because the relative higher position in the pelvis [
2], which may explain why the proportion of girls urethral injuries is higher than female adults in the current literature [
3]. Although rare, the management of female pelvic fracture urethral injuries is complex and there is no guideline yet.
For the diagnosis of bladder and urethral injury in those patients, their genitourinary injuries were often ignored in the emergency room during the primary trauma, unless there were symptoms of hematuria and vaginal bleeding, cause patient’s vitals and life-threatening risks were put in the first place. Black et al. [
4] report in their study that nearly 25% of these patients were diagnosed with urinary injuries accidentally during surgical exploration. Hence we recommend a careful physical examination in the emergency room, and unstable patients might need lower genitourinary tract imaging [
5]. Even diagnosed, most patients were dealt with suprapubic cystotomy. In our cases, all the patients had suprapubic cystotomy after the trauma happened, preoperative cystourethrography showed bladder neck atresia and urethral distraction. We also advise that urethroscopy is needed to know the lesions of bladder and rule out genitourinary fistula. Because of partial healing and fibrosis of their urethral injury, the bladder neck is completely atresic, and the restoration of urinary tract continuity and continence became rather tricky.
Casselman et al. [
6] reported the first case of traumatic complete disruption of the female membranous urethra in the English literature in 1977, the patient was a 2.5 years old girl with an approximately 1 cm avulsion of urethra at the urogenital diaphragm, Casselman drawn down the bladder and the urethra and anastomosed, but after 8 weeks the girl had urethral stricture and the problem was solved by urethral dilation. Direct anastomosis of the urethra would most likely lead to stricture, the missing part of urethra needs to be replaced. Vaginal flap and buccal mucosal graft urethroplasty were more reported and used for female urethral reconstruction, while these techniques are more suitable for female urethral stricture and small urethral loss. For long urethral defect or proximal urethral injuries bladder wall flaps can be adopted for urethroplasty [
7‐
9].The female urethral replacement is mainly accomplished by anterior bladder wall (Tanagho) tube or tubularization of vaginal mucosa [
10]. Tanagho was first to bring up the technique of reconstructing bladder neck with tubular anterior bladder flap in 1981 [
11]. Nayyar et al. [
12] reported their technique of a novel anterior bladder tube for the treatment of traumatic bladder neck contracture based on Tanagho technique. Their report included 3 female patients with good results, which also need further followup and more literature report. For surgical access, we took the combined vaginal and transpubic access, it is recognized that combined vaginal-partial transpubic access is a dependable method for female pediatric patients with complicated bladder neck and urethral trauma after pelvic fracture [
13]. These pediatric female patients all came to our institution with suprapubic catheter, the intervals since their primary trauma are mostly over 6 months, the bladder neck is obliterated by scar tissues and the urethra is atresic, hence the transpubic access provides the maximum operation field and we took total pubectomy to get access to the bladder neck. With combined vaginal approach, the distal urethra is located and urethrovaginal fistulas were repaired. Through the T shape incision of the anterior bladder, two well-vascularized and free flaps are acquired. Giving that the fundus of bladder neck is generally existed in those patients, we used the bladder flap to augment the ventral part of bladder neck and then anastomosed it with distal urethra. Thus, the bladder neck and proximal urethra were expanded, decreasing the chance of further stricture.
Controversy also exist in the surgical repair timing. Black et al. [
4] indicated that the bladder neck injury should be repaired primarily because it is crucial in continence. Patel et al. [
3] did a systematically review of the literature about female urethral injuries associated with pelvic fracture, their results showed that patients who had primary alignment were more likely to have urethral stenosis and fistula. From our perspective, patients who had extensive urethra injury often accomplished by serious damage of other organs, the principle is to deal with life-threatening risks first, so the patients were mostly managed with suprapubic cystotomy and deferred repair [
14].
The mechanism of female continence is not completely clarified yet. It is generally thought that the female urinary continence mechanism is mainly made of the urinary sphincter complex, bladder trigone and the pelvic floor. The urinary sphincter complex includes the inner smooth muscle layer and the external striated muscle layer. The smooth muscle layer mainly locates at the level of bladder neck and the external striated sphincter muscle covers from the bladder neck to proximal urethra. Hence the bladder neck is of great importance in urinary continence. The urethral smooth muscle is under sympathetic control while the striated muscle is mostly under voluntary control. The running of autonomic nerve fibers is near lateral vaginal walls. The innervation of striated muscle transverses the pelvic and enters the caudal third of the urethra laterally [
15‐
21]. The bladder musculature has 3 different muscular layers and forms the internal urethral sphincter at bladder neck. Bladder and urethral muscles have β-adrenergic inhibitory receptors and α-adrenergic excitatory receptors, which can lead to the relaxation and contraction of these muscles [
16,
22,
23]. The muscular distribution and neuroreceptors of bladder is thought to promote continence in bladder flap urethral reconstruction [
11]. In Tanagho technique and existed studies adopting the method of bladder wall flap urethroplasty, the stenosis bladder neck was transected and the fibrous tissues were completely excised, which we think might sacrifice some function of the bladder neck [
10,
11,
14,
24]. An intact bladder neck is crucial to continence, not only because it is where the detrusor locate at and it’s sphincteric, but also because it is where the autonomic nerve and somatic nerve converge. In our surgical procedure, we just incised the atresia bladder neck and used the bladder flap as a patch to expand it. More importantly the dorsal part of bladder neck was preserved, which we thought might favor for continence because more nerve fibers and the intactness of bladder neck might get saved in this way.
Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (
http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.