Pneumatic tourniquet use may be associated with improved outcomes of elbow surgery
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Key takeaways:
- Tourniquet use was associated with improved outcomes vs. no torniquet in patients undergoing elbow surgery.
- Patients who underwent surgery with a tourniquet had reduced OR time, length of stay and blood loss.
Published results showed the use of a pneumatic tourniquet was associated with improved OR efficiency and reduced blood loss for patients who undergoing elbow surgery for fractures compared with no tourniquet.
Kai Hoffeld, MD, from the department of orthopaedic and trauma surgery at the University Hospital of Cologne in Germany, and colleagues performed a retrospective study of 183 patients (average age, 51 years) who underwent 184 elbow surgeries for a fracture between January 2019 and September 2023. They compared outcomes between 97 patients who underwent surgery with a tourniquet and 87 patients who underwent surgery without a tourniquet.
According to the study, the most common fractures were of the radial head (n= 61), olecranon (n = 44) and distal humerus (n = 79). Mean hospitalization was 6.5 days, and mean follow-up was 6.3 months.
Hoffeld and colleagues found the tourniquet group had shorter OR times (102.5 minutes vs. 134.3 minutes), shorter length of stay (5.3 days vs. 7.9 days) and decreased hemoglobin drop (–1.2 g/dl vs. –1.9 g/dl) compared with patients who underwent surgery without a tourniquet.
“Based on these findings, we conclude that the use of a tourniquet is safe in the surgical treatment of elbow fractures and is not inferior to surgery without a tourniquet,” Hoffeld and colleagues wrote in the study.
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