At SICOT in Montreal
The SICOT meeting in Montreal was great for meeting people, but it was over far too quickly.
The presentation was a six-minute talk on the results of the first 100 arthroscopic Latarjet procedures with labral repair. Six minutes is not long for a hundred cases, but it concentrates the mind on what actually matters in the data. Individual results vary.
What SICOT is
SICOT, the Societe Internationale de Chirurgie Orthopedique et de Traumatologie, is an international orthopaedic and trauma society with members across a large number of countries. Its meetings bring together surgeons from health systems with very different resources and very different case mixes. That breadth is the point of a global society. A problem that is unusual in one country is routine in another, and the surgeons who see it most often are not necessarily the ones publishing about it.
The procedure being reported
The arthroscopic Latarjet with labral repair is an operation for shoulder instability. A piece of bone from the shoulder blade, the coracoid process, is transferred with its attached tendon to the front of the socket to replace bone that has been lost and to add a sling effect, and the torn labrum is repaired at the same time. All of it is done through keyhole incisions rather than through an open approach. It is generally considered where a soft tissue repair alone would be unlikely to hold the shoulder.
Why case series are presented
A series of consecutive cases is how a surgical technique is examined over time. Reporting it at an international meeting puts the method in front of surgeons who use other approaches to the same problem and who will question the findings directly, in the room. Reporting the same series again as it grows is how a technique is followed rather than simply announced once and left alone.
Related information
See our shoulder instability and Latarjet with labral repair pages, and our later posts on the same series at 330 cases and 420 cases.