Convening the meeting
As Scientific Secretary of the Queensland branch of the Australian Orthopaedic Association, Dr Ken Cutbush convened the 2017 Annual Scientific Meeting in Noosa.
A good turnout and a full scientific programme, with guest speakers from Sydney and Melbourne.
Dr Cutbush chaired the Sunday morning shoulder session and spoke on assessing glenoid bone loss in unstable shoulders.
What the Australian Orthopaedic Association does
The Australian Orthopaedic Association, generally shortened to AOA, is the professional body for orthopaedic surgeons in Australia. Its responsibilities include the training programme through which orthopaedic surgeons qualify, the accreditation of post-fellowship training positions, continuing professional development for surgeons already in practice, and the national joint replacement registry that tracks how implants perform over time.
The AOA is organised into state branches, and each branch runs its own annual scientific meeting. These are smaller than the national congress and serve a different purpose: they are where surgeons and trainees from one state present their own work, often research that is still in progress, to an audience who operate in the same hospitals and under the same local conditions. The Scientific Secretary of a branch is the office holder responsible for assembling that programme, reviewing the submitted papers and arranging the invited speakers.
Assessing glenoid bone loss
The glenoid is the socket of the shoulder joint, a shallow dish on the outer edge of the shoulder blade. When a shoulder dislocates, bone can be chipped or worn away from the front rim of that socket, and each further dislocation can remove a little more. Since the socket is shallow to begin with, loss of bone from its rim makes the joint easier to dislocate again.
This matters because it influences the operation chosen. Where the rim is largely intact, repairing the torn labrum and ligaments back onto it may be sufficient. Where a significant amount of bone has gone, a soft tissue repair has less to anchor to, and a procedure that replaces the missing bone, such as the Latarjet, may be considered instead. Measuring how much bone has been lost is therefore the practical basis for that decision, and it is usually done from CT imaging. Methods of measurement differ, which is why it continues to be a subject for scientific meetings. The appropriate treatment for any individual shoulder depends on the full examination and imaging. Individual results vary.