The association of age, race, and sex with the location of proximal femoral fractures in the elderly.

A retrospective study of the data on 27,370 hospital discharges of patients who had been admitted to non-federal Maryland hospitals from 1979 through 1988 for a fracture of the proximal part of the femur and who had been at least sixty-five years old at the time of the fracture showed that the ratio of trochanteric fractures to fractures of the femoral neck increased linearly with age in white and black women. For men, this ratio was stable across age-intervals, being slightly more than one in white men and less than one in black men. Black patients who had a fracture of the hip were more likely than white patients to have a subtrochanteric, open, or femoral neck fracture. The rate of occurrence of fractures of the hip was highest in white women; the rate decreased successively in white men, black women, and black men. The higher over-all rate of fractures of the hip in white patients was disproportionately influenced by the much higher rate of trochanteric fractures in these patients.