Efficacy of Allograft in Fracture Healing

In the last few decades there have been an increased number of accidents leading to trauma including crush injuries and open fractures with bone loss. In Orthopaedic surgery, bone harvested from donor sites is the gold standard for grafting procedure. Although autograft is the standard that all bone graft substitutes must meet or exceed, autograft has significant limitations. Allograft provides an excellent scaffold for the production of the host bone. Allograft bone is available in an unlimited quantity and better quality. Therefore, this study was conducted to evaluate efficacy of Allograft in fracture healing. 30 patients who had bone loss due to fractures, which resulted due to trauma, osteomyelitis, non union and other causes, were included in this study. They were treated with allograft as a bone graft substitute in the institution between the period of January 2023 to February 2024. This study concludes that pure cancellous allograft has properties similar to autograft and has complete graft incorporation. The bone allograft has no donor site morbidity as compared to autograft. The main challenge in using allograft is control of infection which was solved by using meticulous surgical and medical techniques to counter the infection. There was no significant difference in graft incorporation in infected and non-infected patients. Thus, we could conclude that allograft behaves in the same way in infected and non-infected cases. Keywords: Fracture, Trauma, Allograft, Grafting, Bone Loss