A Randomized Clinical Trial of Direct Anterior vs. Anterolateral Approach for Hip Arthroplasty After Femoral Neck Fracture in the Senior Population

Displaced femoral neck fractures are one group of hip fracture patients that are commonly treated with cemented hemiarthroplasty (HA) or total hip arthroplasty (THA). Compared to those who receive a THA, recipients of HA tend to be less active, more debilitated, and more dependent on gait aids and the care of others. In this population, the increased stability and decreased operating time associated with HA is thought to be more important than the minimal increase in function this population could achieve with THA. Additionally, cemented femoral stems in HA are thought to result in less pain, increased function, and less periprosthetic fracture risk when compared to cementless stems.

With the relative pre-injury debility of the femoral neck fracture population, especially those receiving HA, it is important to optimize all aspects of patient care to allow them to participate in therapy and return them to their preoperative functional level as quickly as possible. Furthermore, any intervention in this population should minimize the physiologic insult of surgery as much as possible. In the elective hip arthroplasty population, the direct anterior approach (DAA) has shown to be effective in helping patients to quickly obtain high postoperative function. This approach has also been shown to be effective in arthroplasty for displaced femoral neck fractures in a few studies. However, the only studies that directly compare two approaches for hip arthroplasty for femoral neck fractures utilize the anterolateral approach (ALA) versus posterior approach (PA) or DAA versus PA. No studies of which we are aware directly compare the DAA to the ALA. The DAA and ALA are the two most popular approaches for bipolar hemiarthroplasty at our institution, so investigators are setting out to determine the differences between them.