Recognizing blunt force trauma injuries

When a patient has experience blunt force trauma, what types of injuries should the emergency care team recognize? April Blong, DVM, DACVECC, an associate clinical professor at the Iowa State University Lloyd Veterinary Medical Center in Ames and the medical director at Iowa Veterinary Specialties in Des Moines, discusses some of the obvious injuries as well as less obvious injuries, in a dvm360 interview.

Blong presented continuing education (CE) sessions on emergency and critical care at the 2025 Fetch dvm360 Conference in Kansas City, Missouri, where her interview was recorded. These CE sessions presented insights on abdominal and thoracic injuries in blunt force trauma cases as well as identifying and stabilizing possible traumatic brain injury and spinal cord injury. In this video, she addresses one of the key takeaways from her presentation on blunt force trauma.

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The following is a transcript of the video:

April Blong, DVM, DACVECC: Lot of times we're looking at things that I would say…[are] maybe the less obvious external injuries. [These] are things like bleeding into cavities. Even if you fracture a bone, you actually have a lot of blood loss. Bones are very vascular, and so we see dogs that come in with multiple fractures and they need blood transfusions, even though they haven't lost a drop of blood externally. We also have to worry about injuries to the chest cavity, so contusions or bruising of the lung, [or] air accumulation outside of the lungs in the chest. And then less commonly we see diaphragmatic hernias, where the abdominal contents are in the chest cavity. Those are some of our more common injuries. And then I think the more obvious ones are things [like] broken bones, lacerations, wounds, that kind of stuff.

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