What happens before and after a hip fracture?

• Background: One of the strongest risk factors in medicine in general is that one has had a condition before. In fragility fracture prior fracture is a well-known risk factor for a new one. But how about other injuries? And how is the injury panorama before and after a hip fracture?Method: In Umeå, Sweden, all injury events at the emergency department were registered population-based, 1993-2014. We analyzed 60,590 injury events in people >50, comparing prior injuries in hip 4,619 hip fracture patients to 29,211 patients without hip fracture.Results: Hip fracture patients had had more prior injuries than controls. These differences were larger below 75. Also, other injuries had a predictive power for hip fracture, some 80- 60 % lower than fractures. In all, injuries had only a moderate power to predict hip fracture. The events clustered around the index hip fracture; before and afterwards, because of the high mortality. However, not less than 12% got a second hip fracture, 2% on the same side. On both sides, the second was more often than not of the same type as the first one, which may perhaps indicate constitutional factors.Conclusion: Trauma recidivism can be measured. All injuries should used to target secondary prevention—but should be supplemented with other readily available robust patient record data for spotting persons with a very high fall/fracture risk, e.g., residence, multimorbidity and polypharmacy. Considering the dismal outcome of hip fracture, it seems a god idea to emulate injury prevention models in, e.g., road traffic. For this we need on-line statistics of health care data. 

Ämnesord

MEDICIN OCH HÄLSOVETENSKAP  -- Klinisk medicin -- Ortopedi (hsv//swe)

MEDICAL AND HEALTH SCIENCES  -- Clinical Medicine -- Orthopaedics (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

hip fracture

epidemiology

Orthopaedics

ortopedi

Publikations- och innehållstyp

vet (ämneskategori)

ovr (ämneskategori)