A reverse shoulder replacement as a revision surgery was recently performed successfully for a failed fracture fixation on a 50-year-old patient by Dr Anand Jadhav, joint replacement surgeon from Ruby Hall Clinic and Aditya Birla Memorial Hospital.
Jadhav claimed the reverse shoulder replacement was carried out on a patient for the first time in Pune and the country. “This technique is less than a year old and no one has carried it out so far,” he told DNA.
“During this procedure, the position of the ball and socket in the shoulder is reversed as compared to a normal joint. A new ball, called glenosphere, is fixed to the shoulder socket while the humeral head (end of the arm bone) is replaced with a mobile shoulder socket. This socket sits on top of a metallic stem implant inserted into the humerus,” he said.
This surgery is performed to revise cases which are failed in standard shoulder replacements or for severe fractures of the upper end of the arm bone. The surgeon said only those people undergo the surgery, who have tender shoulder and non-repairable tears.
Speaking about the patient, Jadhav said, “The patient was suffering from osteoporosis and had undergone internal fixation of the fracture of upper arm bone more than a year ago. This was due to a fall and a fixation surgery was performed using imported locking plate and screws. The metal work used to fix his fracture started causing him pain and limited his shoulder and arm movements. This made us zero in on carrying out the revision surgery.”
