The congress
Attending the 11th Biennial ISAKOS Congress in Shanghai in June 2017, as invited faculty for a sports medicine session on the Latarjet procedure for anterior shoulder instability, speaking on the arthroscopic Latarjet technique.
About ISAKOS
ISAKOS is the International Society of Arthroscopy, Knee Surgery and Orthopaedic Sports Medicine. Its members are surgeons working in arthroscopic and sports related orthopaedics, and it holds a congress every two years in a different part of the world. The society also produces consensus statements and classification systems, which matter because they give surgeons in different countries a common way of describing the same injury, and without that comparing results between units is difficult.
Anterior shoulder instability
The shoulder is the most mobile joint in the body, and that mobility comes at the cost of stability. Anterior instability means the ball of the shoulder repeatedly slips forward out of its socket. It usually begins with a dislocation that damages the labrum, the rim of soft tissue that deepens the socket, and in some shoulders bone is also lost from the front of the socket itself.
The Latarjet procedure
The Latarjet procedure addresses that bone loss. A small piece of bone, the coracoid process, is transferred with its attached tendon to the front of the socket, which both deepens a socket that has lost bone and adds a restraint across the front of the joint. It is generally considered where there is significant bone loss, or where a previous soft tissue repair has not held. The alternatives include arthroscopic repair of the labrum and, in some shoulders, a remplissage. Individual results vary.
The Latarjet has traditionally been performed as an open operation through an incision at the front of the shoulder. The arthroscopic version achieves the same thing through small portals with a camera inside the joint, and is technically demanding, which is why conference sessions on it concentrate on the detail of technique as much as on when to use it.
Related information
See our post on the session itself and our shoulder instability, anterior instability, Latarjet with labral repair, arthroscopic Bankart repair and remplissage pages.