Which patients undergo a surgical reintervention following a distal radius fracture?

Not all malunited distal radius fractures cause pain or functional impairment, and only few patients require a surgical correction or a salvage procedure. The purpose of this retrospective study was to investigate differences between 38 patients who underwent a reintervention and 65 patients who did not. The only discriminative variable in the current study was age : 46 years in the reintervention group versus 59 years in the non-reintervention group (p < 0.0001). Differences in gender or type of malunion were not significant, and thus not discriminative. It can be concluded that patient age may be more often associated with a reintervention than gender or radiological characteristics of wrist fractures.