General case of the day. Longitudinal stress fracture of the left femoral diaphysis and stress reaction in the right femur.

Case Report: Longitudinal Stress Fracture of the Humerus: Imaging Features and Pitfalls

“…In the original description of this entity [10], five of the six cases involved the tibia; the sixth case involved the femur. There have since been numerous additional reports of longitudinal stress fractures involving the tibia or femur [7,8,11,12,19,20,22,23]. To our knowledge, this is the first reported case of a longitudinal stress fracture occurring in the upper extremity.…”

“…Patients with longitudinal stress fractures commonly present with indolent pain with a duration of symptoms of several weeks [1,4,10,11,22], sometimes presenting as late as 6 months after onset of symptoms [11]. Longitudinal stress fractures generally affect two groups of patients: athletes and patients with osteoporosis (most commonly postmenopausal women) [4,10,11].…”

“…Longitudinal stress fractures have been reported exclusively in the lower limb. There are several reports of longitudinal stress fractures in the tibia [4,8,10,11] and a small number of reported cases in the femur [22,23]. The diagnosis is important, as some of the imaging features can overlap with inflammatory and neoplastic entities and therefore awareness of the diagnosis and its specific imaging signs is needed.…”

Longitudinal stress fracture of the femur: A rare presentation

“…Our search of the literature found only 12 similar cases, 11 pertaining to insufficiency stress fractures [5] , [6] , [7] , [8] and 1 to a fatigue stress fracture [9] . The patients in the cases reported with insufficiency stress fractures are almost always female, with a mean age of 72 years, as reported in the literature review in the work of Maraval et al [8] .…”

“…However, a longitudinal presentation is also possible, occurring with significant frequency in the tibia [3] , [4] . Longitudinal femoral stress fractures are quite rare, with only 12 cases described in the English literature, to our knowledge [5] , [6] , [7] , [8] , [9] . We describe a case of a longitudinal insufficiency stress fracture of the femur, depicted with conventional radiography, computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance (MR).…”