Maximizing Patient Performance After Total Hip Arthroplasty

This article discusses the clinical significance of restoring hip kinematics and the effect of implant design and surgical technique on proper restoration of the anatomic condition of the hip. Incomplete restoration of femoral offset, body weight lever arm, and hip center height could cause subtle functional deficits in patients that conventional clinical outcome measures would not capture, but that may affect safety. We illustrate this with a case example of a patient who suffered falls while attempting to clear low obstacles after a clinically “successful” hip replacement with a 135-degree neck shaft angle stem that did not restore femoral offset.

Keywords:  hip kinematics , femoral offset , surgical technique