Severe Pelvic Fracture in the Elderly: High Morbidity, Mortality, and Resource Utilization

Trauma team activation for older patients with pelvic fractures: Are current criteria adequate?

OBJECTIVES

The present study aimed to identify the impact of age on current trauma team activation (TTA) processes and outcomes for patients with pelvic fractures.

METHODS

Adult patients with moderate and/or severe pelvic fractures (Abbreviated Injury Scale ≥ 2) between 1 January 2016 and 31 December 2021 were included utilising major trauma hospital data in Queensland. Characteristics of older (age ≥ 65) and younger patients including TTA, interventions and outcomes were examined. Multivariate analysis was used to determine factors associated with TTA in older patients.

RESULTS

Data from 637 patients was included. Despite comparable injury severity, a TTA was activated in fewer older people (older: 65% vs. younger: 79%, P < 0.001). Older patients had more falls leading to the trauma presentation (54.4% vs. 22.6%, P < 0.001), with higher initial systolic BP (131 vs. 125 mmHg, P = 0.04). Outcomes were worse for older people, with greater rates of in-hospital complications (27.2% vs. 16.4%, P = 0.004), and longer hospital stays (12 vs. 8 days, P = 0.04). Fewer older patients could be discharged independently to home (46.3% vs. 74.5%, P < 0.001). In older patients, falls and haemodynamic parameters were strongly associated with the reduced likelihood of TTA (fall mechanism [odds ratio (OR)] 0.33; 95% confidence interval [CI] 0.15-0.74; P = 0.01; systolic BP [OR 0.98; 95% CI 0.97-0.99; P = 0.03], heart rate [OR 0.97; 95% CI 0.95-0.99; P = 0.02]).

CONCLUSION

Current TTA criteria based on higher energy mechanisms and traditional vital sign thresholds are inadequate for identifying injury in older patients. Sensitive triage criteria and increased clinician awareness are required to enhance injury recognition and improve outcomes in older trauma patients.

Weight-bearing Guidelines for Common Geriatric Upper and Lower Extremity Fractures

PURPOSE OF REVIEW

The purpose of this review paper is to summarize current weight-bearing guidelines for common geriatric fractures, around weight-bearing joints, of the upper and lower extremities.

RECENT FINDINGS

There is an increasing amount of literature investigating the safety and efficacy of early weight-bearing in geriatric fractures, particularly of the lower extremity. Many recent studies, although limited, suggest that early weight-bearing may be safe for geriatric distal femur and ankle fractures. Given the limited data pertaining to early weight-bearing in geriatric fractures, it is difficult to establish concrete weight-bearing guidelines in this population. However, in the literature available, early weight-bearing appears to be safe and effective across most injuries. The degree and time to weight-bearing vary significantly based on fracture type and treatment method. Future studies investigating postoperative weight-bearing protocols should focus on the growing geriatric population and identify methods to address specific barriers to early weight-bearing in these patients such as cognitive impairment, dependence on caregivers, and variations in post-acute disposition.

Two-Stage Structure-Focused Contrastive Learning for Automatic Identification and Localization of Complex Pelvic Fractures

Pelvic fracture is a severe trauma with a high rate of morbidity and mortality. Accurate and automatic diagnosis and surgical planning of pelvic fracture require effective identification and localization of the fracture zones. This is a challenging task due to the complexity of pelvic fractures, which often exhibit multiple fragments and sites, large fragment size differences, and irregular morphology. We have developed a novel two-stage method for the automatic identification and localization of complex pelvic fractures. Our method is unique in that it allows to combine the symmetry properties of the pelvic anatomy and capture the symmetric feature differences caused by the fracture on both the left and right sides, thereby overcoming the limitations of existing methods which consider only image or geometric features. It implements supervised contrastive learning with a novel Siamese deep neural network, which consists of two weight-shared branches with a structural attention mechanism, to minimize the confusion of local complex structures of the pelvic bones with the fracture zones. A structure-focused attention (SFA) module is designed to capture the spatial structural features and enhances the recognition ability of fracture zones. Comprehensive experiments on 103 clinical CT scans from the publicly available dataset CTPelvic1K show that our method achieves a mean accuracy and sensitivity of 0.92 and 0.93, which are superior to those reported with three SOTA contrastive learning methods and five advanced classification networks, demonstrating the effectiveness of identifying and localizing various types of complex pelvic fractures from clinical CT images.

Left-Sided Heart Defects and Laterality Disturbance in Hypoplastic Left Heart Syndrome

Hypoplastic left heart syndrome (HLHS) is a complex congenital heart disease characterized by hypoplasia of left-sided heart structures. The developmental basis for restriction of defects to the left side of the heart in HLHS remains unexplained. The observed clinical co-occurrence of rare organ situs defects such as biliary atresia, gut malrotation, or heterotaxy with HLHS would suggest possible laterality disturbance. Consistent with this, pathogenic variants in genes regulating left-right patterning have been observed in HLHS patients. Additionally, Ohia HLHS mutant mice show splenic defects, a phenotype associated with heterotaxy, and HLHS in Ohia mice arises in part from mutation in Sap130, a component of the Sin3A chromatin complex known to regulate Lefty1 and Snai1, genes essential for left-right patterning. Together, these findings point to laterality disturbance mediating the left-sided heart defects associated with HLHS. As laterality disturbance is also observed for other CHD, this suggests that heart development integration with left-right patterning may help to establish the left-right asymmetry of the cardiovascular system essential for efficient blood oxygenation.

[Preliminary application study of dual-robotic navigated minimally invasive treatment by TiRobot and Artis Zeego on pelvic fractures]

Objective

To summarize the surgical learning curve and preliminary operative experience of dual-robotic navigated minimally invasive treatment on pelvic fractures by TiRobot and Artis Zeego.

Methods

Between July 2019 and February 2021, 90 patients with pelvic fractures were treated with dual-robotic navigated minimally invasive surgery by TiRobot and Artis Zeego. There were 64 males and 26 females, with an average age of 46.5 years (range, 13-78 years). Body mass index was 14.67-32.66 kg/m ² (mean, 23.61 kg/m ²). Causes of injuries included traffic accident in 43 cases, falling from height in 37 cases, low-energy injuries such as flat falls in 10 cases. The interval between injury and surgery was 1-36 days (mean, 7.3 days). According to the location of the implanted screws, the patients were divided into sacroiliac screw group ( n=33), acetabular screw group (acetabulum anterior/posterior column, n=24), composite screws group (sacroiliac and acetabulum anterior/posterior column, n=33). According to the screw implantation time and accuracy, the surgical learning curve was plotted, and the differences in the relevant indicators between learning stage and skilled stage were compared.

Results

All 90 patients successfully completed the operation, the intraoperative bleeding volume was 5-200 mL (median, 20 mL). There was no vascular or nerve injury. All incisions healed by first intention. The screw implantation time ranged from 7.5 to 33.0 minutes (mean, 18.92 minutes), and the screw implantation accuracy ranged from 1.1 to 1.8 mm (mean, 1.56 mm). According to the learning curve, the practice stage of 3 groups was reached after 7, 10, and 11 cases, respectively. With the accumulation of surgical experience, the screw implantation time had a significant downward trend. Compared with the learning stage, the screw implantation time on skilled stage in 3 groups significantly shortened ( P<0.05), but the difference in the screw implantation accuracy was not significant ( P>0.05).

Conclusion

TiRobot and Artis Zeego assisted pelvic fracture surgery is safe and efficient, which helps the surgeon to quickly master the pelvic channel screw surgery, and the operation time is significantly shortened on the premise of ensuring the implantation accuracy.

Pelvic fractures in severely injured elderly: a double-adjustment propensity score matched analysis from a level I trauma center

Purpose

Pelvic trauma has increased risk of mortality in the elderly. Our study aimed to analyze the impact of the additional burden of pelvic fractures in severely injured elderly.

Methods

This is a retrospective analysis of a prospectively maintained trauma registry from 2012 to 2018 at an American College of Surgeons (ACS) verified Level I Trauma Center. Trauma patients aged ≥ 65 years with ISS ≥ 16 and AIS severity score ≥ 3 in at least two body regions were divided in two groups: group I, consisted of elderly polytrauma patients without pelvic fractures, and group II elderly who had concomitant pelvic fractures. We used a double-adjustment method using propensity score matching (PSM) with subsequent covariate adjustment to minimize the effect of confounding factors, and give unbiased estimation of the impact of pelvic fractures. Balance assessment was conducted by computing absolute standardized mean differences (ASMDs) and ASMD < 0.10 reflects good balance between groups.

Results

Of 12,774 patients admitted during this time, 411 (3.2%) elderly with a mean age of 77.75 ± 8.32 years met the inclusion criteria. Of this cohort, only 92 patients (22.4%) had pelvic fractures. Females outnumbered males (55 vs. 45%). Comparing characteristics of group I and group II using ASMDs, pelvic trauma patients were more likely to have higher systolic blood pressure (SBP), head injuries, lower extremity injuries, anticoagulant therapy, and cirrhosis. Fewer variables differed significantly after matching. We observed few instances of worse outcomes associated with pelvic trauma using PSM with and without covariate adjustment. Crude PSM without covariate adjustment, showed a significantly higher rate of deep vein thrombosis (DVT) for pelvic trauma (p < 0.001). Crude PSM also showed a significantly higher rate of ventilator-associated pneumonia (VAP) in group II (p = 0.006). PSM with covariate adjustment did not confirm differences on these outcomes. PSM both without and with covariate adjustment found lower ventilator days and ICU length of stay among patients with pelvic trauma. No significant differences were seen on 12 outcomes: death, acute kidney injury (AKI), acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), cardiac arrest with cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR), myocardial infarction (MI), pulmonary embolism (PE), unplanned intubation, unplanned admission to intensive care unit (ICU), catheter-associated urinary tract infection (CAUTI), and hospital length of stay.

Conclusions

At a Level I Trauma Center the additional burden of pelvic fractures in seriously injured elderly did not translate into higher mortality. PSM without covariate adjustment suggests worse rates among pelvic trauma patients for DVT and VAP but covariate adjustment removed statistical significance for both outcomes. Pelvic trauma patients had shorter time on ventilator and in the ICU. Whether similar analytic methods applied to patients from larger data sources would produce similar findings remains to be seen.