(1) arthroscopic complete repair with an additional posterior interval slide and a subsequent side-to-side repair of the interval slide edge (complete-repair group)
compared with
(2) arthroscopic partial repair with margin convergence and without the additional posterior interval slide (partial-repair group)
at a minimum follow-up of 5 years.
Patient assignment to treatment group was not randomized.
Patient assignment to treatment group was not randomized.
While both groups had significant improvements in clinical outcomes, a retear was identified in almost 90% of the patients:
22 (88%) of the 25 patients in the complete-repair group and
28 (85%) of the 33 patients in the partial-repair group.
Patients in the complete-repair group had larger retear sizes (p = 0.001) and reduced acromiohumeral intervals (p = 0.007) compared with those in the partial-repair group.
There were no significant differences in the clinical outcomes between groups.
Comment: This paper failed to examine the effect of repair integrity on the clinical outcome. The observation that patients were clinically improved in spite of an almost 90% repair failure rate suggests that the "repair" may have had little to do with the outcome.
It is of interest that in spite of having "large and massive" tears, these patients had excellent active motion before surgery as shown in the table below.
Comment: This paper failed to examine the effect of repair integrity on the clinical outcome. The observation that patients were clinically improved in spite of an almost 90% repair failure rate suggests that the "repair" may have had little to do with the outcome.
It is of interest that in spite of having "large and massive" tears, these patients had excellent active motion before surgery as shown in the table below.
In that the clinical outcomes were improved in spite of the lack of cuff integrity at followup suggests that these patients may have equally benefitted from a simpler surgery that did not attempt to re-establish cuff integrity, such as a smooth and move procedure (see this link).
===
How you can support research in shoulder surgery Click on this link.
We have a new set of shoulder youtubes about the shoulder, check them out at this link.
Use the "Search" box to the right to find other topics of interest to you.
You may be interested in some of our most visited web pages arthritis, total shoulder, ream and run, reverse total shoulder, CTA arthroplasty, and rotator cuff surgery as well as the 'ream and run essentials'
