ArtiFacts: Femoroacetabular Impingement—A New Pathology?

Excerpt

From the Column Editor,

In ArtiFacts, we tend to explore what the material culture in orthopaedics tells us about the evolving practice of orthopaedic medicine. In this month’s guest column, we are taking a slightly different tack. Rather than looking at a medical device, we will examine a pathological specimen that challenges a contemporary assumption.

Using modern methods of examination, Moritz Tannast MD and his clinical research team in collaboration with the Anthropological Institute in Zürich, Switzerland, analyzed the bones of an approximately 5000-year-old specimen and discovered clear macroscopic features of a cam-type femoroacetabular impingement deformity—a condition typically found in high-level athletes of the 20 ^th and 21 ^st centuries.

Indeed, the science in this column is intriguing. But the presentation, which includes a number of images and a supplemental video, truly makes this a fascinating story for the reader.

— Alan Hawk BA

Buried underneath one of the oldest excavation sites in Schweizersbild, Switzerland (Fig. 1A–B), lay the well-preserved skeletal remains of a male subject (Fig. 2) from the Neolithic Age (approximately 10,000 years to 2000 years BCE). Jakob Nüesch, a natural scientist and teacher, first discovered the Neolithic cemetery in the so-called “cave of Schweizersbild” in 1891 [5]. Many of these bones have been studied by anthropologists using classical methods for reasons of scant interest to surgeons [6, 8, 11]. But recent analyses on one skeleton from this dig, which we have performed in collaboration with the Anthropological Institute in Zürich, Switzerland, may answer a timely orthopaedic question: Is femoroacetabular impingement (FAI) a new condition [3, 19, 23]—a product of 20^th-century sports and activity demands [13, 20]—or has it always been a part of human skeletal pathomorphology?

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