Women age 65 or older who suffer a hip fracture are much more likely to die from any cause in the following year than those who avoided the injury, a new study says.
Researchers have already established that the many hip fractures occurring in postmenopausal women with the bone-thinning disease osteoporosis increase the risk of death, but they haven't been able to rule out the possibility that women who fracture a hip are already at greater risk before their injury, according to CNN.
The new study, which compared age-matched women with and without fractures, is the first to suggest a possible cause-and-effect relationship between hip fracture and death, says lead author Erin LeBlanc, M.D., a researcher at Kaiser Permanente Northwest, the large nonprofit health plan in Portland, Oregon, that funded the study, CNN reports.
LeBlanc and her colleagues tracked women in four states across the country between 1986 and 2005, as part of a larger study funded by the National Institutes of Health, according to CNN. From this pool of study participants, the researchers matched each of the 1,116 women who'd had hip fractures with four women of the same age who had not.
Overall, women who suffered a hip fracture had twice the odds of dying within one year of their injury than did their counterparts in the control group during the same year, CNN reports. Seventeen percent of the women who experienced a fracture died during the year, versus eight percent in the control group.
