A case of bilateral stress fractures in an old woman: three years of pain.

In elderly patients frequent episodes of joint pain of lower limbs exacerbated by stress and resistant to treatment occur frequently. This paper reports a case of a long lasting bilateral atraumatic knee pain with a final diagnosis of bilateral stress fractures of proximal tibia in osteoporotic postmenopausal woman. The distinctive trait of this case is that the fracture has set in bilaterally and associated with an isthmic L4-L5 spondylolisthesis in a patient afflicted by a decline in mood. This particular clinical picture has delayed the diagnosis and the suitable treatment for 3 years. Therapy for this type of patients must aim in the acute phase at pain relief and only after must be settled in a long term antiosteoporotic therapy. We choose clodronate acyd for pain relief and after strontium ranelate for osteoporosis prevention.

The second hip fracture in osteoporotic patients: not only an orthopaedic matter.

The second hip fracture indicates the fracture of the osteoporotic femoral neck which occurs in patients already operated on the opposite side. It is a growing problem, especially in Italy where the ageing rate of the population is one of the highest in the world. Only in recent years this issue has been discussed in the international literature about timing and the treatment methods as a consequence linked to the social costs, mortality, disability of this pathology. The aim of our study is the evaluation of the incidence of hip fractures in a sample of patients that already substained a surgical procedure for a proximal femour fracture. The evaluation was based on the time elapsed between the two fractures, the quality of life after the second fractural episode through a telephone questionnaire (EQ-5D), the incidence of mortality, the adhesion to the antifractural therapy and the comparison of the obtained data to the international standards.