Images in Clinical Medicine

Nail Injury to the Skull

Wayne X. Shandera, M.D., and Anne Hayman, M.D.

N Engl J Med 2001; 345:339August 2, 2001

• Slide

Article

Figure 1 A 58-year-old carpenter was working at a home-construction site while a colleague working above him fired nails into a board with a nail gun. The board broke during one of the firings, accidentally propelling a galvanized nail into the patient's left medial orbit and across the sinuses and soft tissues below the base of the skull. He presented without any evident neurologic damage. An arteriogram documented the absence of vascular damage. The nail was removed, and the patient remains well with no sequelae.

Wayne X. Shandera, M.D.
Anne Hayman, M.D.
Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, TX 77030

Citing Articles (3)

Citing Articles

1. 1

   Mark J. Winder, Steven J. Monteith, Graeme Macdonald. (2010) Nailed: The Case of 24 Self-Inflicted Intracranial Nails From a Pneumatic Nailgun. The Journal of Trauma: Injury, Infection, and Critical Care 68:4, E104-E107
   CrossRef

2. 2

   Mark J. Winder, Stephen J. Monteith, Nicholas Lightfoot, Edward Mee. (2008) Penetrating head injury from nailguns: A case series from New Zealand. Journal of Clinical Neuroscience 15:1, 18-25
   CrossRef

3. 3

   Sepehr Sani, Kirk W. Jobe, Richard W. Byrne. (2005) Successful repair of an intracranial nail-gun injury involving the parietal region and the superior sagittal sinus. Journal of Neurosurgery 103:3, 567-569
   CrossRef