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ICYMI: A New Approach to Beating Heterotopic Ossification in Elbow Trauma Surgery

A surprising and well-done paper makes a good case supporting another indication for TXA

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Smart Practice: Consider administering tranexamic acid (TXA) before doing surgery for patients with elbow trauma. It’s an off-label use, so counsel patients accordingly if you opt to do so.

What’s the Claim?

A large, comparative study found that among patients undergoing surgery for elbow trauma, use of tranexamic acid (TXA) before surgery was associated with a lower risk of heterotopic ossification (HO; 9% versus 16%) and a lower risk of clinically important HO (2% versus 6%) within six months of surgery.

This retrospective, observational, comparative study went to great lengths to match the patients well using robust propensity-score matching — sex, age, dominant arm, injury type, open injury, comminuted fracture, ipsilateral trauma, time from injury to surgery, and nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug use all were covered in the matching process.

We covered this topic a few weeks back for CORRelations’ readers in Fractures & Trauma, but wanted to make sure that no one who might benefit from it would miss it. We’re revisiting it here, from a slightly different angle.

How’s It Stack Up?

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