COVID-19 infection may increase risk of pneumonia, mortality after hip fracture surgery
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts
Key takeaways:
- COVID-19 infection was associated with an increased risk of pneumonia and mortality in patients who underwent hip fracture surgery in 2020.
- Researchers compared outcomes between pre- and post-pandemic cohorts.
According to published results, patients with COVID-19 who underwent hip fracture surgery in 2020 had a significantly increased risk for postoperative pneumonia and mortality compared with a historical pre-pandemic cohort.
Megan M. Mizera, MD, an orthopedic surgery resident at Montefiore Health System in Bronx, New York, and colleagues performed a retrospective cohort study of data for patients who underwent hip fracture surgery in 2019 before the COVID-19 pandemic (n = 78) and in 2020 during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic (n = 64). According to the study, postoperative outcomes included 90-day mortality rates, pneumonia, thromboembolic events, ED visits, readmission and cardiac events.
Mizera and colleagues found patients who underwent surgery in 2020 had a 4.27 times higher risk for developing postoperative pneumonia (18.8% vs. 5.1%) and a higher absolute 90-day mortality rate (12.5% vs. 7.7%) compared with patients who underwent surgery in 2019. However, they found no differences between the pre-pandemic and post-pandemic cohorts for any other complications.
“There was no increased risk for thromboembolism between the 2020 and 2019 cohorts, even among COVID-19 cases, as all patients received anticoagulation with heparin,” Mizera and colleagues wrote in the study.
Among patients who underwent surgery in 2020, Mizera and colleagues found patients with a COVID-19 infection had a 5.22 times higher risk for developing postoperative pneumonia (38.9% vs. 10.9%) and a 5.51 times higher risk for mortality at 90 days (27.8% vs. 6.5%) compared with patients without a COVID-19 infection.
“Our study demonstrates that hip fracture surgery remained safe during the peak of the U.S. COVID-19 pandemic, with an expected increase in pneumonia and mortality risk for patients with hip fracture with COVID-19,” Mizera and colleagues concluded.
Collapse
Read more about
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts