The poster
An e-poster titled "Deltoid Reflection During Reverse Shoulder Arthroplasty: Is It A Viable Technique?" was displayed at the 27th SECEC-ESSSE Congress in Berlin in September 2017.
What SECEC-ESSSE is
SECEC-ESSSE is the European Society for Surgery of the Shoulder and the Elbow. Its members are surgeons who concentrate on the shoulder and the elbow, and its principal activity for the wider membership is a congress held each year in a European city. A congress of this kind is where new techniques, registry findings and research still in progress are put in front of colleagues working on the same problems.
Work is presented at these meetings in two main forms. A podium presentation is a short talk followed by questions from the floor. A poster, now usually an electronic poster displayed on screens rather than printed on paper, sets out one piece of work so that delegates can read it in their own time and then find the author to discuss it. Posters are the usual route for a focused technical question, which is what this one was.
The question it asks
A reverse shoulder arthroplasty is a shoulder replacement in which the normal ball and socket arrangement is turned around, so that the ball is fixed to the shoulder blade and the socket to the top of the arm bone. It is used when the rotator cuff tendons are no longer working, because the reversed design allows the arm to be raised by the deltoid, the large muscle over the point of the shoulder, rather than by the cuff.
In a reverse shoulder arthroplasty the deltoid is the muscle that does the work of raising the arm afterwards, so anything done to it during surgery matters. Reflecting the deltoid means detaching part of it to improve access, and then repairing it. The question posed is whether that is a viable approach, which is the right way to frame it: the gain in exposure has to be weighed against any effect on the muscle the operation depends upon. Individual results vary.
Related information
- Our reverse total shoulder replacement page
- Our post on research into deltoid function after this operation
- Our shoulder anatomy page
- Our shoulder surgery page