Résumé
In spite of being rare, fat embolism syndrome is considered a fatal complication after bone fracture and orthopedic procedures. It was suggested that early immobilization might reduce the incidence of fat embolism syndrome. However, no enough data are available to justify this finding
Objectives: The aim of this review is to determine the incidence of fat embolism among patients who had long fracture fixation
Methods: A systematic review of Medline and Cochrane library was conducted on their database. This search yielded 34 papers, 13 of which were related
Results: The incidence of fat embolism syndrome after long fracture fixation ranged from 2.7% and 11%. More specifically, the incidence among long bone fracture patients who were operated early [within the first 24 hours after injury] ranged from zero% in some studies [16,19] to 1.8% in others. As regards late operation, after 24 hour of bone fracture, the incidence of fat embolism syndrome [FES] ranged from 3.5% to 10.4
Conclusions: The incidence of fat embolism in post long fracture fixation is very low. Several research works indicate that early fixation significantly reduce the incidence of FES compared to late fixation