Clinical Experience in the Treatment of Distal Tibial Shaft Fractures

We treated 24 distal tibial shaft fractures in 19 men and 5 women with their average age being 41.8 years old and the average objective term being one year and two months, which included 15 open fractures, from Jan. '86 to Oct. '90.We treated the following cases as a primary treatment: 2 conservative cases, 4 cases used with external fixations, 6 with Ender nails, 3 with T plates, 5 with AO plates and 4 with May plates.Considering each case about the term of union, the degree of malunion and the operative result, we could get the following consequence. It took 12.0 weeks for the Ender nail group to union and 8.7 weeks for the plates group on an average. The valgus angulation developed more in the Ender nails group than the plates group. A better result could be found in the plates group, in which the treatment using May plate was extremely good.