Abstract
There is still little information on the histological characteristics of the acetabular bone tissue after failure of the primary prosthetic component. The purpose of this study is to characterize the viability and quality of the acetabular bone tissue in patients undergoing acetabular revision for aseptic loosening of uncemented components.
19 patients were enrolled: 14 hip revisions and 5 primary total hip arthroplasty. Samples collecting: three acetabular bone biopsy of patients were collected at the time of surgery with a 8G diameter needle after reaming. Histological evaluation: all samples, after removing the mineral component, were cut longitudinally with a thickness section of 5μm and colored with hematoxylin-eosin dichromic dye. Histological evaluation was done by optical microscopy with 40× magnification. Five bone quality classes were developed by evaluating percentage of aseptic necrosis, percentage of active osteoblasts, presence of osteopenia, presence of osteoclasts, absence of intramedullary hematopoietic component. Histological evaluation: the bone quality of cases was significantly poorer than the controls. The differences found were statistically significant between the two groups for percentage of necrosis (p=0.0033), percentage of active osteoblasts (p=0.0071) and presence of osteopenia (p=0.037).
Overall bone quality was significantly worse in the study group due reduced viability, overturn of lamellar structures, reduced amount of intramedullary hematopoietic component in respect to the controls; this could result in poor ability of the host bone to interact with the implanted components.
