Myocardial Injury in Patients with Hip Fracture: A HIP ATTACK Randomized Trial Substudy.

Background

Myocardial injury after a hip fracture is common and has a poor prognosis. Patients with a hip fracture and myocardial injury may benefit from accelerated surgery to remove the physiological stress associated with the hip fracture. This study aimed to determine if accelerated surgery is superior to standard care in terms of the 90-day risk of death in patients with a hip fracture who presented with an elevated cardiac biomarker/enzyme measurement at hospital arrival.

Methods

The HIP fracture Accelerated surgical TreaTment And Care tracK (HIP ATTACK) trial was a randomized controlled trial designed to determine whether accelerated surgery for hip fracture was superior to standard care in reducing death or major complications. This substudy is a post-hoc analysis of 1392 patients (from the original study of 2970 patients) who had a cardiac biomarker/enzyme measurement (>99.9% had a troponin measurement and thus "troponin" is the term used throughout the paper) at hospital arrival. The primary outcome was all-cause mortality. The secondary composite outcome included all-cause mortality and non-fatal myocardial infarction, stroke, and congestive heart failure 90 days after randomization.

Results

Three hundred and twenty-two (23%) of the 1392 patients had troponin elevation at hospital arrival. Among the patients with troponin elevation, the median time from hip fracture diagnosis to surgery was 6 hours (interquartile range [IQR] = 5 to 13) in the accelerated surgery group and 29 hours (IQR = 19 to 52) in the standard care group. Patients with troponin elevation had a lower risk of mortality with accelerated surgery compared with standard care (17 [10%] of 163 versus 36 [23%] of 159; hazard ratio [HR] = 0.43 [95% confidence interval (CI) = 0.24 to 0.77]) and a lower risk of the secondary composite outcome (23 [14%] of 163 versus 47 [30%] of 159; HR = 0.43 [95% CI = 0.26 to 0.72]).

Conclusions

One in 5 patients with a hip fracture presented with myocardial injury. Accelerated surgery resulted in a lower mortality risk than standard care for these patients; however, these findings need to be confirmed.

Level of evidence

Therapeutic Level I . See Instructions for Authors for a complete description of levels of evidence.

COI Statement

Disclosure: The HIP ATTACK-1 trial was supported by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Ontario Strategy for Patient Oriented Research Support Unit, the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care, the Hamilton Health Sciences Foundation, the Physicians’ Services Incorporated Foundation, the Michael G. DeGroote Institute for Pain Research and Care, Smith & Nephew (to recruit patients in Spain), and Indiegogo Crowdfunding. This substudy received funding from a McMaster General Internal Medicine Research Grant. Funders had no role in the study design, conduct, analyses, or manuscript preparation. The Disclosure of Potential Conflicts of Interest forms are provided with the online version of the article ( http://links.lww.com/JBJS/I117 ).

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