Infection and Nonunion Rates in Open Fractures
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Infection and nonunion are common sequelae of open fractures. Studies have shown infection and nonunion rates ranging from 2% to 52% and 12% to 17%, respectively. The present article describes the rates of surgical site infection (SSI) and delayed union/nonunion following open fractures in a large contemporary series of patients from prospective clinical trials with adjudicated outcomes. METHODS: A descriptive analysis was performed with use of patient data from the FLOW, Aqueous-PREP, and PREPARE-Open studies. These studies, published within the past 10 years, included multiple international trauma centers and shared definitions for SSI and delayed union/nonunion. SSI and delayed union/nonunion rates were stratified by the OTA/AO fracture and Gustilo-Anderson open fracture classification systems. Kaplan-Meier estimators were utilized to obtain point estimates, and the log-log transformation approach was utilized to calculate 95% confidence intervals (CIs) for outcome rates. RESULTS: A total of 6,042 open fractures were included. The cumulative SSI rates at 12 months for Gustilo-Anderson Types 1, 2, 3A, 3B, and 3C were 5.1%, 9.7%, 13.8%, 28.9%, and 26.2%, respectively. The cumulative rates of delayed union/nonunion at 12 months for Gustilo-Anderson Types 1, 2, 3A, 3B, and 3C were 3.0%, 5.2%, 8.0%, 14.0%, and 17.0%, respectively. Utilizing the OTA/AO fracture classification to increase the point estimate granularity, the estimated 12-month SSI and delayed union/nonunion rates in 156 Gustilo-Anderson type 3B open tibial shaft fractures (OTA/AO 42) were 34.7% (95% CI, 26.7% to 41.9%) and 18.4% (95% CI, 12.0% to 24.4%), respectively. A companion website with SSI and delayed union/nonunion rates was developed to supplement this article. CONCLUSIONS: Open fractures are a substantial problem with complications that include infection and nonunion. The present data are useful for prognosis, research study design, and informing public awareness and policy. These results show that, despite current treatment approaches, the rates of SSI and delayed union/nonunion following treatment of open fractures remain high at 1 year and are not substantially improved from historical rates spanning several decades. Although open fracture sequelae remain a burden for patients, orthopaedic surgeons, and health-care systems, there may be opportunities for improvement in outcomes. LEVEL OF EVIDENCE: Prognostic Level I. See Instructions for Authors for a complete description of levels of evidence.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".