Abstract
Martha Mainstream’s twin sister Matilda also had pain in her groin and in the thigh, but this had been a problem for only a couple of months. The discomfort was so persistent at night that she had great difficulty turning over in bed. Matilda had no cats to feed; she simply fell in her kitchen &or more accurately, her leg collapsed, causing her to fall. When she arrived at the hospital, the orthopaedic resident took a careful medical history before examining her and learned that she had had a mastectomy five years earlier but otherwise had had no serious medical problems. Unfortunately, the roentgenogram of the femur showed a large lucent lesion with a pathologic fracture that was most likely a metastatic focus related to her mastectomy. Many complex biochemical and biological activities are associated with such a fracture, but some are straightforward biomechanical ones, and the question arises, “How does replacement of bone by tumor weaken the bone?”
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Additional Reading
Athanasou NA: Cellular Biology of Bone-Resorbing Cells. J Bone Joint Surg 78A: 1096–1107, 1996.
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Harrington KD: New Trends in the Management of Lower Extremity Metastases. Clin Orthop 169:53–61, 1982.
Pugh J, Sherry HS, Futterman B, Frankel VH: Biomechanics of Pathologic Fractures. Clin Orthop 169:109–114, 1982.
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© 1999 Springer Science+Business Media New York
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Lucas, G.L., Cooke, F.W., Friis, E.A. (1999). Biomechanics of Pathology. In: A Primer of Biomechanics. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-8487-6_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-8487-6_9
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