Carrying angle in children: a normative study

Information about the carrying angle and its variations are important in the management of paediatric elbow injuries. We measured the carrying angle using bony landmarks for 300 rural South Indian children aged 5-18 years. The study confirms that the clinical carrying angle correlates best with age up to 15 years, following which there was a slight decrease in the angles. The rate of increase of the carrying angle for boys and girls is 0.42 and 0.60 degrees per year respectively. Sex differences seem to gradually increase with a maximum being around puberty. The carrying angle is greater in girls than in boys by a mean of 1.31 degrees. The carrying angle did not correlate well with height, weight, humeral length or ulnar length. The reproducibility of measuring the carrying angle by the simple technique used in our study leads us to propose that this may be used in actual clinical practice.