Papers of the Week

The main long-term benefit of operative treatment of displaced midshaft clavicular fractures is the reduction in nonunion risk, and as this risk is generally low, the ideal approach would be to operate only patients at high risk of nonunion. However, most current surgical decision models use baseline variables to estimate the nonunion risk, and the value of these models remains unclear. Pain in the early weeks after fracture could be potentially be an indirect measurement of fracture healing, and so it is a potential proxy variable that could lead to simpler prediction models.