Abstract
The ‘gold standard’ for treatment of chronic ankle instability is Brostrom-Gould procedure, which is an ‘open’ surgery.
Most authors recommend this type of operation even after an arthroscopic inspection of the joint.
The arthroscopic methods, including thermal shrinkage, propose in the past didn’t received a widely spread support.
We present a method of arthroscopic lateral ligament ‘repair’ with an anchor placed in the fibula.
We used this technique on 31 consecutive patients (28 were available for follow-up).
21 patients were victims of work or traffic accidents and 3 had sport-related lesions.
The patients were evaluated after a 24,5 month follow-up.
The average post-op AOFAS score was 85,3 and average satisfaction was 3,77 (1 to 5)
We had two ‘relapses’ (another sprain without instability on the stress XR). On 3 patients we had some wound healing problems and we had 3 lesions of the superficial peroneal nerve, one of these is persistent. One patient developed a deep vein thrombosis post operatively.
With this method, we achieved good results with relatively few complications, even more considering that most of the patients were work-compensation cases. It’s a simple procedure, less ‘aggressive’ then the traditional one’s, producing an anatomical and functional repair of the lateral ligament.
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