Declining trends in the incidence of hip fractures in people aged 65 years or over in years 2000-2011

Background: The aim of this study was to explore hip fracture (HFx) incidence in the Veneto Region of Italy, looking at potential differences with the national data. Methods: We analyzed HFx incidence for people aged 65 years or over, in years 2000-2011, using data from the Regional Hospitalization Database. Patients were stratified by sex, calendar year and 5-year age class. Data for the single provinces of the Region were also obtained. Absolute number of HFx, crude incidence for 10,000 inhabitants and age-standardized fracture rates were calculated. Results: During the study period, there were 53,917 hospitalizations for HFx (77.7% in females). In the whole 11 year period of observation, the absolute HFx number increased by 17.7% in males and 10.6% females, respectively. However, age-standardized incidence rates declined by 18% in the same period (IRR 0.82, 95% CI 0.78-0.87). This decreasing trend was almost identical through all the age-cohorts up to 84 years. In the whole study period, HFx incidence was lower for Padova (IRR 0.63, 95% CI 0.60-0.66) and Verona (IRR 0.66, 95% CI 0.63-0.70) provinces as compared to the others. This regional profile was quite different with respect to the data published, for the same calendar years, for Italy as a whole, in spite of an almost identical demography of the population. Conclusions: HFx incidence is declining in the Veneto Region of Italy. Further studies, aimed to investigate factors involved in this figure are needed. (C) 2016 Published by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of European Federation of Internal Medicine.