50-Year-Olds Get New Knees in Record Numbers

During the past three decades there has been a dramatic, 130-fold increase in knee replacement surgeries, particularly among individuals in their 50s, a Finnish study found.

via Medical News: 50-Year-Olds Get New Knees in Record Numbers – in Surgery, Orthopedics from MedPage Today.

Knee replacement cost – cost of knee replacement surgery.

After reading about the dramatic increase in the number of knee replacements I did a Google search for “average cost knee replacement” without the quotation marks in the search string.  At the top of page one was the second link above.

Taiwan anyone?

Older Women Have 2X Mortality Risk First Year Post Hip Fx

Medical News: Mortality High in Year After Hip Fracture – in Orthopedics, Orthopedics from MedPage Today

Older women who experience a hip fracture have a twofold increase in mortality risk in the first year after the fracture, researchers found.

During the 12 months following the fracture, 16.9% of the women died, compared with 8.4% of controls, for an odds ratio of 2.3 (95% CI 1.9 to 2.8), according to Erin S. LeBlanc, MD, of Kaiser Permanente Northwest in Portland, Ore., and colleagues. They researchers adjusted for potential confounders such as age, bone mineral density (BMD), and coexisting conditions such as diabetes, hypertension, and stroke.

And the increased mortality risk during the first year remained after further adjustment for specific hip fracture risk factors such as total hip BMD (OR 2.4, 95% CI 1.9 to 3.1), the researchers reported online in Archives of Internal Medicine.