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Rare disease
CASE REPORT
Obturator hernia: a rare cause of bowel obstruction
  1. Cátia Carreira Rito1,
  2. José Travassos2,
  3. Joana Patrício2,
  4. Ana Luisa Duarte3
  1. 1Surgery Department, Hospital do Espirito Santo de Evora EPE, Evora, Portugal
  2. 2Surgery Department, Hospital do Espirito Santo de Evora EPE, Evora, Portugal
  3. 3Department of Radiologia, Hospital do Espirito Santo de Evora EPE, Evora, Portugal
  1. Correspondence to Dr Cátia Carreira Rito, ccrito{at}yahoo.com

Summary

An obturator hernia is a rare condition and an unusual cause of intestinal obstruction. With a challenging diagnosis, it has one of the highest mortality rates of all abdominal wall hernias. The authors present a case of an elderly woman with bowel obstruction secondary to an incarcerated obturator hernia. An 80-year-old woman presented at the emergency room with complaints for the last 2 days of nausea, vomiting, constipation and lower right abdominal pain that radiated down to the right medial thigh. Abdominal tenderness to deep palpation of the right iliac fossa and mildly distention were noted. A CT scan demonstrated bowel obstruction secondary to an incarcerated obturator hernia. The patient underwent emergency exploratory laparotomy. The incarcerated bowel was reduced and the defect was repaired with a plug of polypropylene mesh covered with peritoneum. The patient had an uneventful postoperative period and was discharged on the fifth postoperative day.

  • general surgery
  • gastrointestinal system
  • small intestine

https://doi.org/10.1136/bcr-2017-219369

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    Footnotes

    • Contributors CCR: responsible for patient's investigation in the emergency room, patient's surgery, outcome and follow-up; did data analysis and interpretation, conception and design of the work, wrote the manuscript after references research, acquisition of surgery pictures and made critical revision. JT: participated in patient's surgery, outcome and follow-up of the patient, drafting the work and revising it critically for important intellectual content; did data analysis and interpretation and also made critical revision of the article and gave final approval of the version to be published. JP: substantial contributions to the conception and design of the work; drafting the article; made critical revision of the article and gave final approval of the version to be published. ALD: made the imagiological diagnosis and selected the CT scan images; critical revision of the article and gave final approval of the version to be published.

    • Competing interests None declared.

    • Patient consent Obtained.

    • Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.