Future Research Needs for the Treatment of Common Hip Fractures: Identification of Future Research from Evidence Report No. 184 [Internet]

Excerpt

The 2009 systematic literature review “Treatments of Common Hip Fractures” was conducted for the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons to provide input for their development of clinical guidelines for surgical procedures for implantable devices. The nominator was interested in understanding the interaction between patient factors, types of hip fractures, types of surgical implantable devices, and outcomes. The subsequent systematic review conducted by the Minnesota Evidence-based Practice Center (EPC) was unable to fully address the research questions with the existing literature because of (a) the limited perspective of discipline-specific investigations (i.e. orthopaedic or epidemiology), which tended to use incomplete sets of important independent variables in study designs and models, and (b) the generally low quality of hip fracture outcome studies to date, where specific populations were poorly defined, and the use of inconsistent outcome variables and assessment tools prevented aggregating or even comparing results. The objective of this project was to work with stakeholder groups with an interest in improving hip fracture patient outcomes to examine, refine, and prioritize research questions and methodological approaches that would fill the existing research knowledge gaps in hip fracture treatment.