There is therefore an increasing interest on the role of drug intervention to reduce the risk of NVFs [16] and subsequent Trichostatin A manufacturer mortality [17]. To our knowledge, this is the first study analysing all consecutive patients older than 50 years of age presenting with a NVF during a 5-year follow-up. The aim of the present study was to

determine the 5-year absolute risk (AR) of subsequent NVF and mortality after a NVF. Materials and methods Recruitment of patients In this retrospective study, the hospital database code (International Classification of Disease, ICD-9) for fractures was used to recruit patients. All fractures reported in the patients’ MEK162 medical files were radiographically confirmed. Only subsequent fractures that are reported in the same hospital database were used for the follow-up analyses. Whether patients were deceased during follow-up was confirmed using the national obituary database. Inclusion criteria for this study were the following: (1) age ≥50 years, (2) a recent NVF between January 1999 and December 2001 and (3) living in the postal code area of Maastricht. Patients were excluded if they had sustained a pathological fracture. Vertebral fractures were not taken into consideration. The ICD-9 was used

to classify clinical fractures into 15 categories: skull, vertebra, clavicle, thorax, pelvis, humerus, forearm, wrist, hand, hip, femur, patella, tibia/fibula, ankle or foot. These fractures were further analysed according to fracture location (humerus, wrist and hip) and grouping of several locations: PS-341 in vitro other, multiple simultaneous fractures belonging Montelukast Sodium to the six main NVFs (wrist, leg, humerus, hip, pelvis or clavicle) or not [16] and into major fractures (hip, pelvis, proximal tibia or humerus, multiple ribs and distal femur) and minor fractures (all other fractures)

[18]. All groups are mutually exclusive and included all patients. Available potential risk factors for subsequent fracture and mortality included age, sex and baseline fracture locations [6, 15]. In this paper, we only showed the Kaplan–Meier and Cox regression analyses with major vs. minor fractures as baseline fracture location. To create Table 1, we used the other classifications as mentioned above. Table 1 Patients according to baseline fracture location Baseline fracture location Men, N = 488 (%) Women, N = 1,433 (%) All N = 1,921 (%) Humerus 38 (7.8) 184 (12.8) 222 (11.6) Wrist 69 (14.1) 433 (30.2) 502 (26.1) Hip 115 (23.6) 354 (24.7) 469 (24.4) Other 203 (41.6) 358 (25.0) 561 (29.2) Multiple 63 (12.9) 104 (7.3) 167 (8.7) 6 main NVFs 341 (69.9) 1,211 (84.5) 1,552 (80.8) No main NVFs 147 (30.1) 222 (15.5) 369 (19.2) Major 214 (43.9) 651 (45.4) 865 (45.0) Minor 274 (56.1) 782 (54.6) 1,056 (55.