Incidence of Tibial Tubercle Fractures in Patients With and Without Osgood-Schlatter Disease

Background: Patients with Osgood-Schlatter disease (OSD) may be at increased risk of tibial tubercle fractures due to an underlying weakness of the tibial tubercle apophysis relative to the patellar tendon as a result of repetitive microtrauma.

Hypothesis/purpose: The purpose of this study is to analyze the incidence of tibial tubercle fractures in patients with and without Osgood-Schlatter disease. We hypothesized that the incidence of tibial tubercle fractures would be higher in patients with Osgood-Schlatter disease.

Methods: A retrospective cohort analysis of the PearlDiver database was performed by querying all patients diagnosed with Osgood-Schlatter disease between January 2010 and October 2022. An OSD cohort of 146,672 patients was captured using International Classification of Diseases, Ninth Revision (ICD-9), Tenth Revision (ICD-10) billing codes, and age as inclusion/exclusion criteria. The Student t test and the χ 2 analyses were used to compare the demographics and obesity between the OSD and control cohorts. Multivariable logistic regressions, controlling for residual differences in age, sex, and obesity, were used to compare rates of tibial tubercle fractures.

Results: Patients with a recent history of OSD were found to have higher rates of tibial tubercle fractures than the control group at all measured time points ( P <0.001). The 1-year rate of tibial tubercle fractures was 0.62% in the OSD group. The incidence of tibial tubercle fractures in the OSD group was 627.3 cases per 100,000 person-years compared with 42.7 cases per 100,000 person-years in the control group ( P <0.001). Male sex and obesity were also associated with an increased risk of sustaining a tibial tubercle fracture within these patient populations ( P <0.001).

Conclusion: We report a significantly higher incidence of tibial tubercle fractures among patients with OSD compared with controls. This increase was most significant at 1 month following OSD diagnosis, however, held true for all measured time points. In addition, male patients and those with obesity were also noted to have increased incidence of tibial tubercle fractures regardless of an OSD diagnosis.