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When patients undergo hip-fracture repair, they have the option of general anesthesia or regional (spinal or epidural) anesthesia. In comparative studies, neither of these two approaches has emerged as decisively better than the other. In this study, researchers in Taiwan used a national database to compare outcomes with regional anesthesia or general anesthesia in older patients (age, ≥65) who underwent hip-fracture repair between 1997 and 2011.
Through propensity scoring, 52,000 patients who received general anesthesia were matched (by age, sex, comorbidities, and fracture type) with 52,000 patients who received regional anesthesia. Regional anesthesia, compared with general anesthesia, was associated with significantly lower rates of in-h…