On the scientific faculty at ACASEA 2017
At the ACASEA 2017 congress in Mumbai as part of the scientific faculty. The meeting drew 450 surgeons, with 27 national and 26 international speakers from 16 countries, and the audiovisual arrangements were impressive.
Good to see colleagues from Australia and New Zealand there. With thanks to the organisers.
What ACASEA is
ACASEA is the Academic Congress of the Asian Shoulder and Elbow Association, the regional meeting for surgeons across Asia whose practice concentrates on the shoulder and elbow. A regional congress of this kind sits between a national society meeting and a world congress. It is large enough to attract speakers from outside the region, which is why the programme included international as well as national faculty, but focused enough that the whole programme is about one part of the body.
Scientific faculty are invited to give the teaching lectures that frame each session, as distinct from the submitted papers presented by delegates. The practical value of a meeting on this scale is that approaches developed in very different health systems are compared directly, and a technique that depends on equipment or follow-up arrangements that are not available everywhere is quickly identified as such.
The talk
The presentation that morning was on preventing infection in total shoulder replacement surgery.
Infection in shoulder replacement, and why it has its own session
A total shoulder replacement substitutes metal and plastic components for joint surfaces worn away by arthritis. Infection around those components is uncommon, but it is among the more serious problems that can follow the operation, because bacteria are able to settle on an implant surface in a form that antibiotics alone struggle to clear. Dealing with it often means further surgery rather than medication by itself, which is why so much of the effort goes into preventing it in the first place.
Prevention is not one measure but a sequence of them, running from how the skin is prepared in the days before surgery, through the choice and timing of antibiotics around the operation, to how the theatre is run and how implants and instruments are handled. The shoulder has considerations of its own, because some of the organisms involved live in skin glands around the shoulder and upper chest rather than arriving from outside the patient, and they can be slow to show themselves. Individual results vary.
Related information
- For patients, our post on preventing infection in shoulder replacement surgery covers the same ground in accessible terms.
- Our post on benzoyl peroxide.
- The anatomic total shoulder replacement page.
- The reverse total shoulder replacement page.