Role of Conservative Management in High Grade Renal Injuries: Our Experience at a Tertiary Care Centre

Introduction: Renal injuries account for up to 1–5% of alltrauma related injuries. Over the years there has been a shifttowards non-operative treatment for blunt renal trauma. Theaim of our study was to assess outcomes of patients managedconservatively (non-operatively) for high grade blunt renalinjury at our centre.Material and methods: The study was conducted in aretrospective manner using hospital records of last 5 years. Allpatients with blunt renal injuries were included. These patientswere categorized based on AAST(1989) injury gradingand further subdivided into operative and non-operativemanagement groups. These management strategies wereanalyzed in terms of ‘failure of non- operative management’,complications and need for adjunctive procedures. Descriptiveanalysis was done using Microsoft Excel(2010, ver14)software.Results: Forty three patients were included in the study witha mean age of 44.6 years. Out of the total, 28 had grade I– III injuries, 11 had grade IV and 4 had grade V injuries.All the grade I-III patients were managed conservatively andrequired no adjunctive procedures. One (9%) of grade IV and2(50%) of grade V injuries underwent immediate exploration.Out of 10 cases of grade IV injuries which underwent nonoperative management, 3(30%) required delayed explorationand none of the grade V injuries required delayed exploration.Complications included urinary tract infection (UTI) (6 cases),persistent hematuria (3 cases), hypertension(2 cases), urinoma(2 cases) and ileus(2 cases) .All complications were Claviengrade 1-2 with no mortalities overall.Conclusion: If the patient is hemodynamically stable,even grade IV and V blunt renal injuries can be managedconservatively, as is seen in our study where failure of nonoperative management occured in only 30% of grade IV andnone of the Grade V injuries.