Greater trochanteric pain syndrome is a not uncommon condition of the hip region which is due to tendinitis-tendinopathy of the region. Biologic agents are a therapeutic tool used for a variety of orthopaedic conditions. On the other hand, surgery, particularly by arthroscopic means, has been used more and more in recent years for the treatment of greater trochanteric pain syndrome.
A new study sought to shed further light on this, attempting to compare these two techniques for the treatment of greater trochanteric pain syndrome, that is the use of biologic agents and the use of surgery, for the treatment of greater trochanteric pain syndrome that does not settle with conservative treatment. The authors carried out a systematic review of the literature comparing the results of the two treatment methods. They drew information from the Medline and Embase databases in June 2019. They used data from clinical studies and studied the demographic characteristics of the patients and their assessment by outcome scores, and a qualitative analysis of their methodology was carried out. In all, five studies of biologic agents and five studies of surgical treatment were used, containing 94 and 185 patients respectively. The mean follow-up of the patients was two to 26 months for the biologic agents, and 12 to 70 months for the surgical treatment.
The authors concluded that both biologic agents and surgical treatment for the management of persistent greater trochanteric pain syndrome showed statistically significant improvements, based on the hip outcome scores. It therefore appears that injections of biologic agents for persistent greater trochanteric pain syndrome provide an effective and safe alternative treatment in such cases. In addition, they concluded that if surgery is chosen then the endoscopic (arthroscopic) treatment is safer than the open technique.
Source: “Arthroscopy”, March 2020