Early Complication of Sugrical Treatment of Acetabular Fractures

Acetabular fracture is usually due to severe trauma and it is often accompanied with other comorbidities. Most often the treatment of choice is open reduction and internal fixation. There are early and late complications of surgical treatment. In this study we tried to investigate early complications including nerve injury infection heterotopic ossification and thromboembolism among our patients. In this prospective deh1ive epidemiologic study 46 patients (39 men 7 women) with the mean age of 34.3 years old (range of 17–71 years) who had undergone open reduction and internal fixation of acetabular fracture in a 3 year period in two teaching hospitals in Ahwaz were studied for their early complications. The follow ups had a range of 3 to 35 months (mean: 11 months). From 46 patients 34 had type A and 12 type B acetabular fractures (based on AO classification). There were 5 cases (10.9%) of iatrogenic peroneal nerve injury 6 (13%) infection and 12 (26.1%) heterotopic ossification. There was no case of thromboembolism. Acetabular fracture fixation is generally associated with high complication rate. Our cases had unexpectedly more complications in comparsion to similar reports.