Fatih Inci

Does zinc supplementation affect the clinical healing process of stress fracture?

Monitoring levels of local pain and weight-bearing are important subjective data used for clinical follow-up of fracture healing, in the foot stress fractures (SFs). Medical treatment has been focused on vitamin D and calcium intake, hovewer there has been no study on the effect of zinc for this fractures. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of zinc supplementation on the clinical healing process of SFs in foot. We retrospectively analysed patients with stress fracture in foot. Patients divided into two groups as those who used oral zinc supplementation (group 1) (n=43) and did not use (group 2) (n=52) during clinical healin process. The clinical healing process of the patients were monitored with the Visual Analogue Scale (VAS) scoring system and time to painless Weight Bearing (WB) on the fracture site. The data of the patients were recorded at intervals of three weeks for up to six months. There was a significant difference between the groups according to the mean VAS pain score in the first three months (p

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