Severe congenital malformation of the leg – reconstruction instead of amputation
In this country, it is not uncommon for a severe malformation of this kind, such as this tibial aplasia (malformation of the tibia), to be grounds for amputating the limb. State-of-the-art surgical procedures do, however, allow the limb to be “saved”.
In this case, the tibia is missing except for a small portion at the knee joint, but by and large the fibula developed normally. One problem encountered in the case of this young girl was, however, that her foot was misaligned at a 90-degree angle. After opting to reconstruct the limb following discussions with the child and her parents, we initially implanted an external fixator (Taylor Spatial Frame). Over the next three months, we distracted (stretched) the soft tissue whilst simultaneously aligning the foot in the correct position using computer-assisted technology.
As part of a further operation, the fixator was removed and the fibula was transferred to the location of the tibia. Thanks to the previous stretching procedure, the fibula only needed to be shortened a little. This meant that a loss of length was almost entirely avoided. The young girl is now able to walk with a smaller orthosis, but the leg will most certainly need to be lengthened once more in the future.
