March 29, 2021

Does this young adult patient need a hip radiograph?

Cleveland Clinic Journal of Medicine

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?myncbishare=dukemlib&dr=abstract&otool=dukemlib&term=3322938

A case of a 41-year-old woman with chronic radiculopathy falls and the question arises does she need an x-ray. It turns out that with few risk factors for hip fracture, no debilitating disease, and with the patient not on steroids and with low energy fall, normal exam, and limb is not shortened, rotated, or deformed, the risk for fracture is quite low- the number of hip films one might have to order to find a potential occult hip fracture is quite high.