The Journal of Arthroplasty
Volume 27, Issue 4 , Pages 656-657, April 2012

Letter to the Editor

  • Sulaiman Alazzawi, MBChB, MRCSEd

      Affiliations

    • University College Hospital, London, United Kingdom
  • Aiman Khunda, MRCSEd

      Affiliations

    • Trauma and Orthopaedics, North Western Deanery, UK
  • Shah Jehan, MRCSEd

      Affiliations

    • Hull Royal Infirmary, Hull, United Kingdom

Received 4 August 2011; accepted 21 November 2011. published online 09 January 2012.

Article Outline

 

To the Editor:

We read the article “Short-Term Coagulation Complications Following Total Knee Arthroplasty” [1] with great interest, and we would like to congratulate Dushey et al on their work on validation of patient-reported coagulation complications after total knee surgery.

In the “Methodology section,” the authors state that the concordance between patient-reported and surgeon-verified complications was calculated by dividing the number of surgeon-verified complications by the total number of patient-reported complications.

The results showed the following:

1.Twenty patients reported pulmonary embolism (PE) after their surgery. Sixteen of them were confirmed to have experienced a PE by the investigating surgeon.

2.Sixty-six reported deep venous thrombosis (DVT), and 50 of these patients were confirmed to be correct.

3.Fifty-four patients reported experiencing a major bleeding episode (MBE) after their surgery. Eleven of these patients were confirmed to have experienced an MBE by the investigating surgeon.

We believe that these results make the concordance rate as following:

For PE: 16/20 × 100 = 80.0 %

For DVT: 50/66 × 100 =75.8 %

For MBE: 11/54 × 100 =20.4 %

However, the concordance rates shown in Table 3 were the following:

For PE: 84.2%

For DVT: 86.2 %

For MBE: 36.7%

We will be most grateful if the authors can clarify how the rates in Table 3 have been calculated.

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COI SA and SJ.

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Reference 

  1. Dushey CH, Bornstein LJ, Alexiades MM, et al. Short-term coagulation complications following total knee arthroplasty. A comparison of patient-reported and surgeon-verified complication rates. J Arthroplasty. 2011;8:

 The Conflict of Interest statement associated with this article can be found at doi:10.1016/arth.2011.11.010.

PII: S0883-5403(11)00634-6

doi:10.1016/j.arth.2011.11.010

The Journal of Arthroplasty
Volume 27, Issue 4 , Pages 656-657, April 2012

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