NON-UNION OF TIBIAL SHAFT FRACTURE: FRACTING SCORE ANALYSIS IN A RETROSPECTIVE MULTI-CENTER STUDY

D. Quarta^1*, M. Grassi¹, G. Lattanzi¹, D. Potena², A. D’Anca², A. Gigante¹

¹Clinical Orthopedics, Department of Clinical and Molecular Science, School of Medicine, Università Politecnica Delle Marche, Ancona, Italy;
²Department of Information and Engineering, Università Politecnica Delle Marche, Ancona, Italy

*Corresponding author:
Davide Quarta, M.D.
Department of Clinical and Molecular Science,
School of Medicine,
Università Politecnica delle Marche,
Ancona, Italy
e-mail: davide.quarta18@libero.it

Received: 03 March 2023 Accepted: 19April 2023

ISSN: 1973-6401 Copyright © by BIOLIFE (2023) This publication and/or article is for individual use only and may not be further reproduced without written permission from the copyright holder. Unauthorized reproduction may result in financial and other penalties. Disclosure: All authors report no conflicts of interest relevant to this article.

ABSTRACT

Delayed union, malunion and non-union are serious complications in the healing of fractures. Predicting the risk of non-union before or after surgery is challenging. We analyzed FRACTING score for each patient. The aim of this study was to find out if this score is accurate to predict this complication. We collected tibial shaft fractures undergoing surgery from January 2016 to December 2020 in three different trauma hospitals. In a retrospective multicenter study, we considered only fractures treated with intramedullary nailing, calculating FRACTING score at the time of definitive fixation. Of the 130 patients enrolled, 89 patients (68.4%) healed within 9 months and were classified as union, 41 patients (31.5%) healed in more than 9 months or underwent other surgical procedures and were classified as non-union. For each patient, FRACTING score was calculated, and based on the clinical outcome the score was compared in a statistical analysis. FRACTING showed a good performance predicting the non-union risk. From our data is clear that male gender and greater age is a risk factor for non-union.

KEYWORDS: trauma, bone, tibial fracture, nonunion, scores, prediction model