Delayed surgery may affect fracture recovery
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - An elderly person who has fractured their femur - the large thigh bone that connects the leg to the hip - may want to have surgery sooner rather than later, according to a study linking longer times to surgery to a somewhat increased risk of post-surgery complications.
Dr. Rudiger Smektala from Ruhr University Bochum in Bochum, Germany, and colleagues used data from a study on hip fractures at 286 hospitals to determine whether elderly patients benefit from early surgical treatment for these common fractures.
Just over a quarter of patients had surgery within 12 hours of the fracture, 41 percent had surgery within 12 to 36 hours, and roughly 32 percent more than 36 hours after the fracture.
Patients in the longer time-to-surgery groups were somewhat more likely to develop pressure sores, urinary tract infections, blood clots, or pneumonia, the team found, whereas patients who received surgery early were somewhat more likely to develop postoperative bleeding or implant complications.
None of these differences, however, reached statistical significance.
Time to surgery had no influence on risk of death in the year after surgery, the researchers note.
“(Our study) shows a trend toward more frequent postoperative complications in the longest time-to-surgery group, but no effect of time-to-surgery on mortality,” they conclude.
They also note that the longest time-to-surgery group had a somewhat higher percentage of patients with multiple illnesses than the other two groups.
“A subject that merits further research is that of the so-called ’stable’ patients, a specific subgroup of hip-fracture patients that, in the view of numerous authors, benefits from the shortest possible time-to-surgery,” the investigators say.
SOURCE: BMC Musculoskeletal Disorders, December 29, 2008.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Related Posts:
By Will Boggs, MD NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - For smokers scheduled to undergo an operation, a smoking cessation program that starts shortly before surgery lowers the rate of postop complications, a Scandinavian study shows. The time around a surgical procedure “is a highly effective period for introducing a smoking cessation intervention, and the patients have a
Full Post: Quit-smoking program cuts postop complications
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Older patients often suffer delirium after heart surgery, but this seems to be unrelated to pre-surgery anxiety and depression, according to a new study. “Delirium is a common psychiatric complication after cardiac surgery,” note Dr. Koen Milisen, of Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium, and colleagues. “Special attention” must be paid to delirium after
Full Post: Anxiety does not up risk of post-surgery delirium: study
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Surgery to remove the esophagus is not being used as often as it should be for some cases of early-stage cancer of the esophagus. That’s the conclusion of Dr. E. Carter Paulson and colleagues, from the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, who assessed the treatment of 2,386 patients
Full Post: Surgery underused for esophagus cancer: study
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
By Anne Harding NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - If the US health care system “started to take osteoporosis seriously,” it could slash the number of Americans who suffer hip fractures by at least 25 percent, according to one of the authors of a new report on managing the brittle bone disease. Dr. Richard Dell, an orthopaedic surgeon
Full Post: Aggressive bone care could prevent hip fractures
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
By Will Boggs, MD NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - An enlarged prostate due to benign prostatic hyperplasia, or BPH, can be safely and effectively removed using a type of minimally invasive single-keyhole surgery, researchers report. The procedure, known as single-port transvesical enucleation of the prostate, or STEP, is “indicated in patients with large (greater than 80 to
Full Post: Large prostates removed with single-keyhole surgery