Is the Use of Bioabsorbable Materials in Orthopaedic Surgery Associated with Infections ? Review of the Literature

Bioabsorbable materials have been extensively used in medicine. Many have suggested the use of these implants for treating fractures as well as other orthopaedic conditions since they may lead to less implant morbidity, and they have additional advantages: they are radiolucent, they eliminate hardware removal procedures, they limit stress-shielding and they gradually transfer load to healing fractures. Despite the popularity of these implants, reports of complications continue to appear in the literature. Although these complications have rarely adverse effect on the long term outcome they are quite frequent and have been reported with most of the commercially available implants with varying incidence rates and reactions to them. The purpose of this review is to summarize the infections reported in clinical trials of bioabsorbable materials. © 2015 ACT. All rights reserved.