Smokers would experience longer healing times after a fracture as well as an increased rate of postoperative injuries and infections according to the results of a University of California meta-analysis presented at the 2013 Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons in Chicago.
A team of researchers from the University of Pennsylvania analyzed numerous studies in order to demonstrate a possible association between the smoking and the healing time and the various possible complications after a fracture. They focused on the most common fractures, tibia, femur, hip, ankle and humerus, in a total of 6,480 patient cases treated with both surgical and non-surgical treatment. .
The results of the study show that, for all types of fracture injuries, healing takes about 6 weeks longer to heal in smokers than in non-smokers. A smoker will need more than 30 weeks on average to achieve healing compared to 24 weeks for a non-smoker. Other results show that fractures in smokers have a 2.3 times the risk of not “reducing” compared to the same risk in non-smokers.
