Abstract: Background: Nutrition is one of the important factors that influences bone health. Fractures are quite common and increasing in prevalence in younger ages which could be because of the poor nutrition leading to poor bone health. We have evaluated the correlation between the nutritional status and long bone fracture pattern’s in patients not known or suspected to be Osteoporotic.
Methods: This study was conducted in 85 patients with long bone fracture presenting within 14 days of injury. Patients meeting the criteria for this study had their hematological and biochemical studies done on admission to Orthopaedic wards to document their nutritional status. Patients were evaluated on the basis of their age, gender, fracture pattern’s, modes of injury, and laboratory investigations relevant for nutritional assessment.
Result: Out of total 85 cases in our study 92.94% (n=79) had low serum vitamin-D level, 62.35% (n=53) had low TLC’s level, 9.41% (n=8) had deranged serum creatinine level and 44.70% (n=38) had suboptimal serum albumin level at the time of admission which reflects the poor bone health of even young age group patients. Trend toward more severe fracture pattern was seen among fracture under 18 to 40 year age group patients with deranged nutritional biochemical parameters. Significant p value (p<0.05) were obtained in patients with derranged Serum Creatinine, BUN and RBS level. Although apparently the data shows that frequency of comminuted, segmental and oblique fracture were higher where nutritional parameters are below normal or suboptimal but significant p value could not be obtained in the rest of the nutritional parameters since the number of patients in some fracture patterns were too low or nil to provide an adequate statistical comparison.
Conclusion: Our results on Orthopaedics trauma patients demonstrate that malnutrition is prevalent even in the younger age groups as evidenced by deranged parameters used to ascertain nutritional status. The general trend was of increased fracture severity patterns where Serum Albumin, Serum Calcium, Serum Phosphorus, Serum Creatinine, Blood Urea Nitrogen, Blood Sugar and Serum Vitamin-D were deranged, but a significant p value was obtained only in Serum Creatinine, BUN and RBS.
