Bedside Echocardiography In Patients With Hip Fracture

Although surgery for fractured neck of femur is the highest risk among commonly performed surgery in medicine, there are very few data investigating treatment strategies to reduce the risk in this elderly and frail group of patients. Bedside echocardiography may be an useful tool to stratify surgical risk and optimize anesthesiology strategy. Echocardiography may help to assess a patient's intravascular volume status, myocardial contractility/ventricular ejection fraction and valvular heart disease in the peri-operative period. Careful patient selection based on multidisciplinary approach for pre-operative echocardiography is important to avoid unnecessary delay to surgery and at the same time to manage high risk conditions that may negatively affect the outcome of hip surgery. Larger studies are needed to establish the cost effectiveness of such approach.