Tri-City Medical Center is expanding its services to include hip preservation surgery, a reliable alternative to total hip replacement for active adults and young patients. Doctors at Tri-City Medical Center’s Orthopaedic & Spine Institute are utilizing advanced joint preservation procedures to provide hip pain relief, treat painful hip impingement and help extend the usable life of patients’ natural joints, thus avoiding total joint replacement procedures.
Over the years, youth sports have become more intense and popular. As a result, more young and mid-life adults are arriving in doctors’ offices suffering pain and restricted motion in their hip joints. This is especially true for former or current athletes who have competed in high-impact sports such as basketball, football, lacrosse, baseball and ice hockey. This population is most prone to a condition called Femoroacetabular Impingement, or FAI, which affects the hip joint. Symptomatic FAI is now known to be a pre-arthritic condition.
“Hip preservation surgery with open safe surgical dislocation or arthroscopic means is rather new and many patients aren’t aware of its availability as a modality of treatment,” says Harish S. Hosalkar, MD, hip preservation and deformity correction specialist at Tri-City Medical Center. “For younger patients, a total hip replacement surgery might not last their lifetime, requiring them to replace the same joint more than once. Preservation of the joint means we maintain the natural joint without any resurfacing to alleviate hip joint pain and improve motion and function by restoring the anatomy of the joint.”
Many patients mistake hip pain as an alignment issue or arthritis, but it can often be undiagnosed adolescent or adult hip dysplasia, which can only be corrected through reconstructive surgery. The pain from FAI is caused by abnormal abutment motion between the ball of the hip joint and the socket, often leading to a tear in the surrounding cartilage (labral tear). With hip dysplasia, a shallow hip socket causes problems related to under-coverage. Men and women are both prone to hip dysplasia and FAI, either through their inherent anatomy, genetics or through heavy sports activities and injuries.
Source: www.marketwired.com