DOI: 10.1097/01.BONEJ.0000530205.97819.5d
,
Issn Print: 1938-8659
Publication Date: 2018/02/01
Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
Email
 |
Checking for direct PDF access through Ovid | |
Excerpt
“Obesity greatly increases the complications and costs of care,” said lead author Joey Johnson, MD, in a press release. (See Brown University News, 2017.) Johnson is an orthopaedic trauma fellow at the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University in Providence Rhode Island and a physician at Rhode Island Hospital. “As the rate of obesity increases, the rate of knee dislocations increases. The total number of patients who are obese is increasing, so we are seeing more of these problems.”
In an abstract of the study, the researchers write that, with rising rates of obesity in this country, the burden of knee dislocations in this population remains unknown.
Johnson and co-author Christopher Born, a professor of orthopaedics at Brown, were inspired to look into the role of obesity because of what they have observed clinically over the last five years: an increase in knee dislocations among obese patients with an increased risk of vascular injury.
Moreover, Johnson and Brown have seen an increase in “low-energy” causes of dislocations, especially among obese patients. A few years ago, for example, Johnson saw a patient who experienced a knee dislocation after stepping off a ladder while hanging curtains.
In their retrospective cohort study, Johnson et al. used the Nationwide Inpatient Sample to access inpatient data on patients throughout the country from 2000 to 2012. Included were patients with noncongenital closed knee dislocations.
