Twiddler syndrome with a twist: a cause of vagal nerve stimulator

Pediatric radiology · Dec 2013

Case Reports

Twiddler syndrome with a twist: a cause of vagal nerve stimulator lead fracture.

Twiddler syndrome is uncommon in children and most commonly described as causing lead retraction with implanted cardiac pacemakers and defibrillators. We report an uncommon case of a child repeatedly "twiddling" a vagal nerve stimulator to the point of lead fracture. The findings of Twiddler syndrome illustrated here apply to all implanted devices and show the complication of lead fracture in addition to the more commonly reported complication of lead retraction. This case highlights the need to be aware of the radiographic findings of this phenomenon in children with implanted vagal nerve stimulators due to the perceived increased risk of "twiddling" in pediatric and developmentally delayed patients.

read more… or not…
- Andrew T Trout, David B Larson, Francesco T Mangano, and Cornelia H Gonsalves.
- Division of Pediatric Radiology, Cincinnati Children's Hospital, 3333 Burnet Ave, Cincinnati, OH, 45229, USA, andrew.trout@cchmc.org.
- Pediatr Radiol. 2013 Dec 1;43(12):1647-51.
AbstractTwiddler syndrome is uncommon in children and most commonly described as causing lead retraction with implanted cardiac pacemakers and defibrillators. We report an uncommon case of a child repeatedly "twiddling" a vagal nerve stimulator to the point of lead fracture. The findings of Twiddler syndrome illustrated here apply to all implanted devices and show the complication of lead fracture in addition to the more commonly reported complication of lead retraction. This case highlights the need to be aware of the radiographic findings of this phenomenon in children with implanted vagal nerve stimulators due to the perceived increased risk of "twiddling" in pediatric and developmentally delayed patients.

Pubmed Full text Copy Citation Plaintext

Add institutional full text...
Notes
Knowledge, pearl, summary or comment to share?

300 characters remaining

help

You can also include formatting, links, images and footnotes in your notes

Simple formatting can be added to notes, such as *italics*, _underline_ or **bold**.

Superscript can be denoted by <sup>text</sup> and subscript <sub>text</sub>.

Numbered or bulleted lists can be created using either numbered lines 1. 2. 3., hyphens - or asterisks *.

Links can be included with: [my link to pubmed](http://pubmed.com)

Images can be included with: ![alt text](https://bestmedicaljournal.com/study_graph.jpg "Image Title Text")

For footnotes use [^1](This is a footnote.) inline.

Or use an inline reference [^1] to refer to a longer footnote elseweher in the document [^1]: This is a long footnote..
hide…

Twiddler syndrome with a twist: a cause of vagal nerve stimulator lead fracture.

Notes

300 characters remaining

help

You can also include formatting, links, images and footnotes in your notes

What will the 'Medical Journal of You' look like?

Start your free 21 day trial now.