A fellow presenting at the APOA Conference
Congratulations to Rohit Sane, a fellow from Mumbai, who presented research at the Asia Pacific Orthopaedic Association Conference in Cairns.
What the Asia Pacific Orthopaedic Association is
The Asia Pacific Orthopaedic Association, or APOA, is the regional federation of national orthopaedic associations across the Asia Pacific, Australia among them. It runs a conference at which surgeons and trainees from member countries present their research, and it supports subspecialty sections and travelling fellowships across the region. For a fellow, presenting there means having an abstract reviewed and accepted on its merits, and then answering questions from an audience working in very different health systems.
The study
The study, "Quantifying the Difference in Glenoid Component Position", compares where the glenoid component is placed in total shoulder arthroplasty against reverse shoulder arthroplasty.
The glenoid is the socket of the shoulder, a shallow dish on the outer edge of the shoulder blade, and the glenoid component is the implant fixed to that surface during a shoulder replacement. In an anatomic total shoulder replacement it forms a new socket for a ball on the arm bone. In a reverse replacement the arrangement is swapped over, and the component fixed to the glenoid carries the ball instead.
It reports that the ideal position for a reverse shoulder implant sits lower, or more inferiorly, than for a total shoulder implant. The difference between the two is larger in bigger glenoids, while increasing the size of the implant itself has little effect on it. Individual results vary.
Why this is useful
The two operations are often discussed as variations on the same procedure, but they are planned differently, and this quantifies one of the ways in which that is true. For a surgeon planning either operation, knowing that the target position differs systematically, and that the difference scales with the size of the socket rather than with the implant, is directly applicable at the planning stage.
Related information
- Our anatomic total shoulder replacement page
- Our reverse total shoulder replacement page
- Our research page
- Our post on the difference between the two