Obesity increases the incidence, severity, and costs of knee dislocations.
A new study of more than 19,000 knee dislocation cases in the US between 2000 and 2012 provides a painful indication of how the nation’s obesity epidemic is changing the risk, severity, and cost of a traumatic injury.
“Obesity greatly increases the complications and costs of care,” says lead author Joey Johnson, MD RES’17 F’18, an orthopedic trauma fellow at the Warren Alpert Medical School and a physician at Rhode Island Hospital. “As the rate of obesity increases, the rate of knee dislocations increases. The total number of patients who are obese is increasing, so we are seeing more of these problems.”
Addressing obesity, says co-author Christopher Born, MD, the Intrepid Heroes Professor of Orthopedic Surgery and a professor of orthopaedics, could therefore help reverse the trends in the data reported in the Journal of Orthopaedic Trauma.
Continue reading here.
