In-hospital mortality does not increase in patients aged over 85 years after hip fracture surgery. A retrospective observational study in a Japanese tertiary hospital

INTRODUCTION: Hip fracture is a common and serious orthopedic injury among the geriatric population, necessitating surgical treatment. We tested whether age is a significant risk factor for in-hospital mortality after surgery in this retrospective cohort study and, further, analyzed causes and pattern of death in those patients. METHODS: We queried the electronic hospital records of in-patients aged over 75 years who had undergone hip fracture surgery from the start of 2010 to the end of August 2016 in our hospital, a tertiary hospital on the main island of Japan. The extracted data included patient ID, age, gender, location of fracture, ASA-PS scores, types of anesthesia, durations of anesthesia and surgery, days of hospital stay after surgery, and outcomes at hospital discharge including in-hospital death. The extracted data were divided into two groups based on the patient’s age at the time of surgery: the aged group (age of < 85) and the advanced age group (age of ≥ 85 years), and we compared patient characteristics and management variables and discharge disposition between the two groups. RESULTS: Eight hundred four patient records were extracted (360 in the aged and 444 in the advanced age groups). Although a smaller proportion of patients in the advanced age group could be discharged home, all-cause in-hospital mortality was also similar between the two groups (1.9 and 1.6%, aged and advanced age groups, respectively). Six patients died from advanced cancer, and five patients died of pneumonia resulting from aspiration. CONCLUSIONS: The results of this study suggest that age is not a clinically significant risk factor for in-hospital mortality. The possibility decreasing in-hospital mortality exists in identifying patients at risk of aspiration and preventing it.