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Department of Orthopaedic Surgery Heersink School of Medicine

Faculty, trainees investigate length of stay for patients with ankle fractures, as affected by COVID-19

AnkleDoes COVID-19 affect times to surgery and lengths of stay for patients with ankle fractures?

A group of faculty and trainees recently set out to answer that question and published “Ankle Fracture and Length of Stay in US Adult Population Using Data From the National COVID Cohort Collaborative” in the Foot & Ankle Orthopaedics journal.

According to researchers, the purpose of their manuscript is to introduce the largest cohort of US ankle fracture surgery patients to date with a comparison between lab-confirmed COVID-19–positive and COVID-19–negative.

Researchers first stop was the National COVID Cohort Collaborative (N3C), which is an innovative approach to integrate real-world clinical observations into a harmonized database. They conducted a retrospective cohort of adults with ankle fracture surgery using data from the N3C database with patients undergoing surgery between March 2020 and June 2021.

Figure1 Ankle Fracture N3CUltimately, of 4,735 adults with ankle fracture surgery, the COVID-19–positive group had significantly longer times to and longer lengths of stay compared to the COVID-19–negative group.

This research was supported by the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences of the National Institutes of Health under award number UL1TR003096. Additional details about the funding for this study are available with the publication.

Collaborators included authors affiliated with the Florida International University Herbert Wertheim College of Medicine, University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, Johns Hopkins University, and the Hughston Clinic. Researchers affiliated with UAB included:

To learn more about the study and its methods, click here.