Contact with friends tied to hip fracture recovery

Last Updated: 2008-06-20 12:43:17 -0400 (Reuters Health), Jun. 20, 2008 (Reuters Health delivered by Newstex) --

Contact with friends tied to hip fracture recovery

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Elderly adults who fracture their hip may have better odds of surviving if they have a little help from their friends, a study suggests.

Researchers found that among a large group of elderly hip fracture patients, those who'd had regular contact with friends in the weeks before the injury were more likely to be alive two years later.

While not definitive, the findings suggest that social contact - particularly with friends - may somehow aid elderly adults' recovery from a hip fracture, the researchers say.

The findings appear in the current issue of the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society.

Prior studies have found that elderly adults with social connections tend to live longer than those who are more isolated, even after suffering a heart attack or stroke. It has not been clear whether this is also true after a hip fracture - a major cause of disability and death among the elderly.

For the current study, researchers led by Dr. Edward Mortimore of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services in Baltimore, Maryland examined data on 674 elderly adults who'd been hospitalized for a hip fracture.

In each case, a spouse or other caregiver was asked about the patient's contact with friends and family in the two weeks before and two months after the injury. The researchers also gathered information on patients' overall health, day-to-day functioning before the hip fracture, and depression symptoms.

Over the next two years, 169 study patients died. However, Mortimore's team found, the more contact patients had had with friends around the time of the injury, the lower their risk of dying.

Compared with patients who'd seen or phoned a friend at least once a day before the hip fracture, those with no such contact were five times more likely to die during the study period.

Contact with family was also linked to a lower risk of death, but the apparent protective effect was not as strong as that of contact with friends.

"This study does not provide definitive answers about the importance of social support to survival after hip fracture but does suggest that social support is strongly related to survival," Mortimore and his colleagues write.

More studies, they say, are needed to understand how friends and family can affect elderly adults' survival after hip fracture. In the meantime, the researchers say, doctors should be aware that social contacts may play an important role in hip fracture recovery.

"Patients without extensive family and friend support," write the researchers, "may require more formal, instrumental support from home health or social service agencies than patients with extensive family support."

SOURCE: Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, June 2008.

Newstex ID: REUH-0001-26132117