Shoulder Stiffness=Healing in RC Repair?

Shoulder stiffness is a good thing? In a way, says new research from the University of New South Wales in Australia. Researchers, including co-author George A.C. Murrell, M.D., D.Phil., looked at 1, 533 consecutive shoulders that underwent an arthroscopic rotator cuff repair by a single surgeon.

Dr. Murrell commented to OTW, “I have had an interest in the relationship between stiffness and rotator cuff healing. It was my impression, clinically, that patients who developed a capsulitis type of response often seemed to heal their rotator cuffs very well. We wanted to examine this in a more formal fashion.”

“I think the important thing to take away from this is that if the patient presents with a stiff, painful shoulder before rotator cuff repair or has a stiff, painful shoulder after rotator cuff repair that the clinician should not be scared of this. Actually this healing response can help the patient and those patients who develop stiffness are much more likely to heal their rotator cuff repairs than those that don’t.”

“The most interesting factor is that patients who have a relatively stiff shoulder at six-weeks post rotator cuff repair, i.e., those who had less than 20 degrees of external rotation had a retear rate of 7%, while those with greater than 20 degrees of external rotation had a retear rate of 15%.”

“We would like to continue to explore this relationship. It does fit in nicely with another paper that we published recently, where we compared the outcomes of those who had a capsular release and rotator cuff repair (obviously those patients going into surgery had a stiff shoulder) with those patients who had just had a standard rotator cuff repair. For the patients who had a capsular release and rotator cuff repair, the retear rate was zero, while the retear rate for the others was around 15%.”