Venous thromboembolism (VTE) remains an immediate
threat to patients following total hip and knee replacement. While
there is a strong consensus that steps should be taken to minimise
the risk to patients by utilising some forms of prophylaxis for
the vast majority of patients, the methods utilised have been extremely
variable. Clinical practice guidelines (CPGs) have been published
by various professional organisations for over 25 years to provide recommendations
to standardise VTE prophylaxis. Historically, these recommendations
have varied widely depending in underlying assumptions, goals, and
methodology of the various groups. This effort has previously been
exemplified by the American College of Chest Physicians (ACCP) and
the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons (AAOS). The former
group of medical specialists targeted minimising venographically
proven deep vein thrombosis (DVT) (the vast majority of which are
asymptomatic) as their primary goal prior to 2012. The latter group of
surgeons targeted minimising symptomatic VTE. As a result prior
to 2012, the recommendations of the two groups were widely divergent.
In the past year, both groups have reassessed the current literature
with the principal goals of minimising symptomatic VTE events and
bleeding complications. As a result, for the first time the CPGs
of these two major subspecialty organisations are in close agreement.
We performed a systematic review of the optimal management of septic arthritis in children as recommended in the current English literature using MEDLINE, EMBASE, CINAHL, the Cochrane Library and reference lists of retrieved articles without date restrictions up to 31 January 2009. From 2236 citations, 227 relevant full-text articles were screened in detail; 154 papers fulfilled the inclusion criteria, from which conclusions were drawn on the management of infected joints in children. Our review showed that no single investigation, including joint aspiration, is sufficiently reliable to diagnose conclusively joint infection. The roles of aspiration, arthrotomy and arthroscopy in treatment are not clear cut, and the ideal duration of antibiotic therapy is not yet fully defined. These issues are discussed. Further large-scale, multi-centre studies are needed to delineate the optimal management of paediatric septic arthritis.
The management of patients with a painful total knee replacement requires careful assessment and a stepwise approach in order to diagnose the underlying pathology accurately. The management should include a multidisciplinary approach to the patient’s pain as well as addressing the underlying aetiology. Pain should be treated with appropriate analgesia, according to the analgesic ladder of the World Health Organisation. Special measures should be taken to identify and to treat any neuropathic pain. There are a number of intrinsic and extrinsic causes of a painful knee replacement which should be identified and treated early. Patients with unexplained pain and without any recognised pathology should be treated conservatively since they may improve over a period of time and rarely do so after a revision operation.
Although the importance of sound statistical principles in the design and analysis of data has gained prominence in recent years, biostatistics, the application of statistics to the analysis of biological and medical data, is still a subject which is poorly understood and often mishandled. This review introduces, in the context of orthopaedic research, the terminology and the principles involved in simple data analysis, and outlines areas of medical statistics that have gained prominence in recent years. It also lists and provides an insight into some of the more common errors that occur in published orthopaedic journals and which are frequently encountered at the review stage in papers submitted to the
