Original articlesPassive tension and gap formation of rotator cuff repairs☆
Section snippets
Materials and methods
We recruited 5 patients (mean age, 58 years; age range, 43–67 years; 3 women and 2 men) all undergoing open surgical repair of the right rotator cuff. The indication for surgery was pain and weakness. Exclusion criteria were previous rotator cuff repair, glenohumeral arthritis, and tears considered irreparable by the senior surgeon. A combination of general anesthetic and interscalene block was used.
A single surgeon using a standardized technique performed the operations. First, an
Intraoperative findings
At surgery, it was found that two tears were small (<2 cm in length) and three were large (2–4 cm in length). Two of the large tears included some tears of the superior fibers of the subscapularis. The infraspinatus was intact in all patients; thus, the repairs were considered isolated repairs of the supraspinatus. There were no complications resulting from the additional measurement, which added 19 minutes to the length of the procedure (range, 7–37 minutes).
Data were lost from one patient
Discussion
The first hypothesis for this study was that passive tension in a supraspinatus tendon repair could be modified by changing the position of the arm. The second hypothesis was that the change in tension measured with passive alteration in arm position would be sufficient to affect postoperative gap formation.
This study found that 30° abduction of the arm after a rotator cuff repair reduced the tension at the point of measurement by a mean of 34 N compared with that measured at 0° abduction. The
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This project was funded in part by the Royal College of Surgeons of England, the Wishbone Trust, and the Arthritis Research Campaign.