Femoral neck stress injury with negative bone scan.

The cause of hip and groin pain can be difficult to diagnose because the symptoms are often nonspecific and can be attributed to a wide range of possible conditions. Stress fracture of the femoral neck must be kept in mind when evaluating hip and groin pain in active patients. The consequences of missing such a diagnosis are potentially devastating because of the problematic nature of these injuries. Diagnostic imaging is often used to evaluate possible femoral neck stress fractures. Plain radiographic findings often do not appear until late in the clinical course or sometimes not at all. A bone scan or magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is therefore advocated as the test of choice for diagnosing femoral neck stress fractures. We report a case of stress injury to the femoral neck. There were negative findings on a bone scan, and the injury was ultimately diagnosed by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).