Clinical Outcome of Supracondylar Femoral Fractures Managed Locking Plate Osteosynthesis in a Rural Hospital

Abstract

Introduction: Distal femur fractures in the supracondylar region accounts for approximately seven per centof all femur fractures and are very challenging to manage. These fractures occurs majorly due to severegrade of injury in young age groups and low grade injury in geriatric people with significant soft tissueinjury with joint surface involvement and is bimodally distributed.Material and Method: This prospective study consisted of 45 patients of supracondylar femur fracturesurgically managed by locking plate osteosynthesis in Department of Orthopaedics at our institute withinthe study period of 2 years from June 2016 to June 2018. Functional outcome was measured using Neer’sscoring. Patient were followed up regular intervals of 12 weeks and last follow up was done at the end of 1year.Results: 45 patients were studied i.e 36 males and 9 females with a mean age of 45.46±17.55SD years.Road accident was the most common cause of injury (71.1%),AO classification was used to classify fractureconfiguration and most common was type “33 C3” (26.67%). 39 patients (86.66%) were treated with distalfemur locking plate osteosynthesis and 6 patients (13.33%) with external fixation which was later convertedinto plate osteosynthesis after infection control. Knee stiffness (17.78%) was a common complication andshortening was seen in 6 patients (13.33%). Neer’s scoring was used to calculate outcome of patients inwhich 31(68.89%) patients had excellent to good outcome, 9 patients had fair and 5 patients had pooroutcome.Conclusion: Distal femoral locking plate can be considered as a suitable choice for achieving adequatefixation in distal femoral fractures as there was significant progressive increase in Neer’s outcome scores inmajority cases