Pellegrini-Stieda Disease

Abstract

Out of a series of 9,218 examinations in the X-Ray Department of an Army General Hospital, we have seen 8 cases of an interesting and somewhat rare clinical entity which was first described by Pellegrini in 1905 (5) and by Stieda in 1908 (10). Since that time, this post-traumatic entity has been known as Pellegrini-Stieda disease. It might perhaps better be called post-traumatic calcification in the paraarticular region of the knee. In 1938 Pellegrini (6) reported on 767 cases found in the literature up to that time. It has been the experience of most authors, however, that the disease is much less frequent than that figure would indicate. Kulowski (4), in March 1942, was able to find only 60 cases reported in the English literature. Kohler (3) states that the onset of calcification occurs not less than three weeks following the initial trauma, and we recently have seen a case in which films taken at the time of injury showed no calcification while a film one month later revealed the typical calcification...