Please see Osteoporotic Vertebral Fracture
If the patient presents with a new neurological deficit, please direct them to the nearest emergency department for urgent assessment and imaging. They will liaise with our services as required.
If there is a significant deformity associated with the fracture reported on XR imaging, please refer to our on-call team via Refer a Patient.
If this is an incidental finding or the patient’s only presenting complaint is pain, please ensure they are on adequate bone protection, whether specialist input for osteoporosis is required and consider alternative causes for the fracture. Whilst osteoporosis / fragility fractures are common, other causes such as myeloma and other malignancies should be considered.
If the patient has persistent pain at 6 weeks, please consider referring for cement vertebroplasty by interventional radiology.
Efforts are made to ensure the accuracy and agreement of these guidelines, including any content uploaded, referred to or linked to from the system. However, BNSSG ICB cannot guarantee this. This guidance does not override the individual responsibility of healthcare professionals to make decisions appropriate to the circumstances of the individual patient, in consultation with the patient and/or guardian or carer, in accordance with the mental capacity act, and informed by the summary of product characteristics of any drugs they are considering. Practitioners are required to perform their duties in accordance with the law and their regulators and nothing in this guidance should be interpreted in a way that would be inconsistent with compliance with those duties.
Information provided through Remedy is continually updated so please be aware any printed copies may quickly become out of date.