Manipulative interventions for reducing pulled elbow in young children

Abstract

Pulled elbow (nursemaid's elbow) is a common injury in young children. It results from a sudden pull on the arm, usually by an adult or taller person, which pulls the radius through the annular ligament, resulting in subluxation (partial dislocation) of the radial head. The child experiences sudden acute pain and loss of function in the affected arm. Pulled elbow is usually treated by manual reduction of the subluxed radial head. Various manoeuvres can be applied. Most textbooks recommend supination of the forearm, as opposed to pronation and other approaches. It is unclear which manoeuvre is most successful. The objective of this review is to compare the effectiveness and painfulness of the different methods used to manipulate pulled elbow in young children. We searched the Cochrane Bone, Joint and Muscle Trauma Group Specialised Register, the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials, MEDLINE, EMBASE, CINAHL, LILACS, PEDro, clinical trial registers and reference lists of articles. Date of last search: January 2009. Any randomised or quasi-randomised controlled clinical trials evaluating manipulative interventions for pulled elbow were included. Our primary outcome was failure at the first attempt, necessitating further treatment. Two review authors independently evaluated trials for inclusion and, for the included trials, independently assessed the risk of bias and extracted data. Three trials with 313 participants, all younger than seven years old, were included. All three trials compared pronation versus supination. The methodological quality of all three trials was low because of incomplete reporting and high risk of bias resulting from lack of assessor blinding. Pronation resulted in statistically significantly less failure than supination (risk ratio 0.53, 95% confidence interval 0.32 to 0.87). Pain perception was reported by two trials but data were unavailable for pooling. Both studies concluded that the pronation technique was less painful than the supination technique. There is limited evidence from three small low-quality trials that the pronation method might be more effective and less painful than the supination method for manipulating pulled elbow in young children. However, only a small difference in effectiveness was found. We recommend that a high quality randomised trial be performed to strengthen the evidence.