Accepted for the APOA Congress
This study has been accepted for an oral presentation at the APOA Congress 2025 in Cairns, presented by Brandon Ziegenfuss. It follows publication in JSES International and an earlier presentation at the AOA Annual Scientific Meeting in October 2024.
The cohort
The study follows 50 patients with severe or recalcitrant frozen shoulder, assessed at regular intervals following a complete capsular release.
What was reported
The published study reports statistically significant improvements in all measures of function, pain and range of motion at 24 months. It also reports that improvements exceeding the minimal clinically important difference were seen in up to 94% of patients as early as two weeks after surgery.
Two qualifications are worth stating plainly. The 94% figure is an upper value rather than a typical one, and the detail of which measure it applies to is in the paper. And this is a single cohort of 50 patients without a comparison group, so it describes what happened to those patients rather than establishing that this approach is better than another. No complications were reported in the series. Individual results vary.
Surgery is not the first step
It is worth noting that the patients in this study had severe or recalcitrant disease. Most frozen shoulders settle with non-surgical treatment over time, and release is generally considered only after a reasonable period of analgesia, physiotherapy and injection has not resolved the problem.
Read it
The study is available on ScienceDirect, and the surgical technique is described in Arthroscopy Techniques.
Related information
See our frozen shoulder and frozen shoulder release pages, and our posts on freeing frozen shoulders and the 360° arthroscopic release technique.