Abstract
An analysis on prospective data collected on our hip database was carried out on all patients undergoing primary cemented unilateral total hip arthroplasty in the last 5 years comparing the short term outcomes between diabetics and non-diabetics. There were 1220 non-diabetics and 77 diabetics identified from the database with at least 3 years follow up. (average 3.6 years). We found no significant difference with respect to age, sex and diagnosis between the 2 groups. Diabetics did have a significantly higher BMI (30.2 versus 27.7, p< 0.001) and higher incidence of coronary artery disease (31% versus 15%, p< 0.001) We found no increase in the rate of deep periprosthetic infection, superficial wound complications, dislocation, blood loss and DVT between diabetics and non-diabetics even after adjusting for potential confounders of age, sex, diagnosis, BMI and the presence of coronary artery disease. The only factor that was found to be significantly different between the 2 groups was length of stay (10.73 versus 9.56 days, p< 0.05). Further analysis of the diabetic group only showed no difference with regard the same outcomes between insulin-dependent, diet-controlled and diet and oral hypoglycaemic-controlled patient subsets. From this study we conclude that at the time of taking informed consent from diabetic patients undergoing total hip arthroplasty the only potential difference from non-diabetics is that the length of stay may be longer.
Theses abstracts were prepared by Professor Roger Lemaire. Correspondence should be addressed to EFORT Central Office, Freihofstrasse 22, CH-8700 Küsnacht, Switzerland.
