Assessing Frequency of Preoperative Cardiac Testing in Patients with Acute Hip Fracture

Orthopedic intervention within 48 hours is the standard of care for patients who are hospitalized with hip fractures. The goal of preoperative cardiac assessment is to ensure patients are optimized for surgery without causing unnecessary delay. Researchers retrospectively reviewed data from more than 1000 older patients (age, ≥65) with acute hip fractures at seven New York hospitals to determine the association between use of preoperative noninvasive cardiac testing and several outcomes.

Preoperative pharmacological stress testing was rare (<1%), and transthoracic echocardiogram (TTE) was relatively common (33%). After adjustment for potentially confounding factors including comorbidities, patients admitted to the medical service had 3.5 tim…