Early prediction of tibial and femoral fracture healing: Are we reliable?

Introduction: To evaluate the ability of orthopaedic trauma subspecialists to predict early bony union in femoral and tibia shaft fractures.

Materials And Methods: Eight orthopaedic trauma subspecialists prospectively predicted the probability of bony union at 6 and 12 weeks post-operatively for an aggregate of 48 femoral and tibial shaft fractures treated at a Level 1 trauma centre. An additional orthopaedic trauma subspecialist was blinded to treating surgeon and adjudicated healing at 18 weeks.

Unloader knee braces for osteoarthritis: do patients actually wear them?

Background: Unloader braces are a nonsurgical approach for predominantly unicompartmental knee arthritis. Although noninvasive, braces are expensive and it is unclear whether clinical factors, if any, will predict regular brace use.

Questions/purposes: We asked: (1) Do patients continue to use the unloader brace more than 1 year after it is prescribed? (2) Do any clinical or radiographic factors predict continued use of the unloader brace after the first year? (3) What are the most common subjective reasons that patients give for discontinuing the brace?

Methods: We administered 110 surveys to all patients who were fitted for unloader knee braces for predominantly unicompartmental osteoarthritis 12 to 40 months before administration of the survey.

Comparison of trauma mortality between two hospitals in Turkey to one trauma center in the US.

Objectives: The development of comprehensive international trauma case registries could be used to perform outcomes analysis and comparisons between countries with the goal of improving trauma care worldwide.

Methods: A retrospective study (April 2004 to April 2005) of injured patients from a Pennsylvania state trauma center (PSTC) were case matched according to age, sex, and injury severity score with two Turkish hospitals. Patients' demographics (age, sex), prehospital information (mechanism of injury, mode of transportation), injury severity (injury severity score and Glasgow coma score), and outcomes (intensive care unit length of stay, hospital length of stay, mortality) were collected.