Bone cement not weakened by cefuzonam powder

Abstract

We report tensile, shearing, and bending tests on bone cement to which cefuzonam sodium (Cosmosin®), a third generation cephalosporin, had been mixed. Mixing 3 g of cefuzonam sodium to 40 g of polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA) polymer did not diminish the strength of the bone cement in any of the tests. We speculated that this lack of influence was because the cefuzonam sodium powder used was in the form of relatively uniform-sized spheres and therefore did not become the origin of stress concentration within the cement.