← All decks
Orthopaedics
Acetabular Fractures
Built from Orthopedic Trauma Essentials
What’s inside
6 sections · 81 slides
Overview
- What this topic answers
- Start with the socket itself
- The hip socket on the pelvic bone
- Three bones meet at the socket
- Landmarks around the socket
- The vocabulary you need
Does every fracture fit the classification?
The Letournel system, and the patterns that refuse to sit in it
- The system everyone uses
- Elementary and associated patterns
- The five elementary types
- The five associated types
- How the classification was built
- A fracture line that plain film almost hides
- Cross-sectional slice through both hip sockets
- Why new patterns started appearing
- How often does a fracture not fit?
- Studies reporting unclassified acetabular fracture types
- Reading that table
- Which patterns keep falling outside
- Where that leaves the classification
Early surgery or delayed surgery?
What the clock costs, and where the real cut-off sits
- Why timing is a decision, not a detail
- What early fixation buys
- Evidence supporting earlier fixation
- What that evidence table shows
- Why anyone would wait
- What waiting costs
- Studies on the outcomes of delayed surgical intervention for acetabular fractures
- Studies on the outcomes of delayed surgical intervention for acetabular fractures - reported findings
- Studies on the outcomes of delayed surgical intervention for acetabular fractures - reported findings (continued)
- What the delayed-surgery table shows
- What early callus does to the operation
- The three-week wall
- But late does not mean hopeless
- Why delayed-fixation results disagree
- Which delayed series look good, and which do not
- How strong is this evidence?
- The timing answer in four lines
Combined pelvic ring and acetabular injuries
Which half of a broken pelvis do you fix first?
- A rare and heavy injury
- The pelvic ring and the sockets it carries
- Why the two halves argue with each other
- There is no agreed order
- The case for the pelvic ring first
- The case for the acetabulum first
- Where the 2024 review landed
- Choosing the sequence
- What nobody has shown yet
- The sequencing answer in four lines
The elderly patient: fix it or replace it?
Acute total hip arthroplasty versus open reduction and internal fixation
- An ageing problem
- The two operations, in plain terms
- Why fixation alone can disappoint here
- A hip replacement seen on a plain film
- Acute replacement versus rescue replacement
- Who Nicol's findings point to
- What the systematic reviews add
- The 2025 meta-analysis
- Who should get an acute replacement
- What acute replacement costs
- The elderly answer in four lines
Percutaneous fixation
Screws through stab wounds, for the fractures that allow it
- Fixing a fracture without opening it
- What has widened its use
- What the minimally invasive route saves
- Who gains most from avoiding a big exposure
- Percutaneous screws across both acetabular columns
- Reading one oblique view of that case
- The accepted indication
- Why fix a fracture that is barely displaced
- Where experienced surgeons have pushed it
- Where percutaneous fixation does not belong
- Why the technique is hard
- How a percutaneous case runs
- Always have an exit plan
- The percutaneous answer in four lines
- The five answers on one page
- What to carry into practice
- Where the evidence is still thin
- References
- References (continued)
- References (continued)
- References (continued)
- References (continued)
- References (continued)
- Orthopedic Trauma Essentials 2026