Patients with hip fractures are usually fragile and elderly, with more than 30% being 60 years or older. Hip fracture patients have a high perioperative mortality and morbidity with a 30-day mortality more than 10% and a 1-yr mortality of more than 25%. Despite the advances in surgical and anesthetic techniques during the last 20 years a decrease in mortality after surgical repair of hip fractures has not been observed.
CLINICAL BACKGROUND Regional anesthesia with neuraxial blockade has been shown to decrease both postoperative mortality and morbidity in lower body procedures, but a meta-analysis of the available studies of regional vs general anesthesia in hip fracture patients has only shown a non-significant, the trend towards decreased mortality. Perioperative morbidity in surgical procedures is often multifactorial in nature, and unimodal interventions such as regional…
