Aims

Hip displacement, common in patients with cerebral palsy (CP), causes pain and hinders adequate care. Hip reconstructive surgery (HRS) is performed to treat hip displacement; however, only a few studies have quantitatively assessed femoral head sphericity after HRS. The aim of this study was to quantitatively assess improvement in hip sphericity after HRS in patients with CP.

We carried out a morphometric analysis of acetabular dysplasia in patients with cerebral palsy requiring hip surgery using three-dimensional CT. We evaluated 54 hips in 27 patients. The contralateral normal hips of ten patients with unilateral Perthes’ disease were used as a control group. The acetabular defects were assessed qualitatively as anterior, posterior or global. Quantitative assessments were made using three-directional acetabular indices (anterosuperior, superolateral and posterosuperior) and measured by multiplanar reformation, from which we calculated the acetabular volume.

In the qualitative study, posterior defects were most common in the subluxation group whereas global defects predominated in the dislocation group. In the quantitative study, all acetabular indices in both the subluxation and dislocation groups were higher than those in the control group and the superolateral indices showed a tendency to elevation in the dislocation group. The acetabular volume was largest in the control group, smallest in the dislocation group, and intermediate between the two in the subluxation group.