|
This is a technique to restore bone stock
lost when aseptic loosening has eaten bone away. It was originally popularised
by Dr Tom Slooff and colleagues at Nijmegen in the Netherlands and further
perfected by Mr Graham Ghie working with Professor Robin Ling in Exeter, UK.
The basic idea is to take allograft bone
harvested from human donors and grind this into a form suitable for packing
into the cavities created by aseptic loosening. Special tools and techniques
are used to achieve a tightly packed bed of bone onto which new components are
cemented in place. It sounds simple enough but requires experience!
The (dead) allograft bone is gradually
replaced by your own living bone in a process known as creeping substitution.
One could therefore think of allograft as a sort of compost helping the body to
repair itself and lay down bone to replace what was lost.
The allograft bone is obtained from human
donors whose femoral heads would otherwise be thrown away at the time of
primary Total Hip Relacement (THR). These donors are tested for transmissable
diseases eg HIV, hepatitis and their bone is not used until a second set of
blood tests 6 months later remains negative. In this respect, the precautions
are even more stringent than those surrounding blood transfusion. To learn more
click on this link http://www.blooddonor.org.uk/pages/tissserv.html
IBG is particularly indicated for younger
patients who are still active and have had a THR which has failed. Older
patients may be more suitably managed by simply using longer stems or larger
socket components. To use longer components in younger patients creates the
situation where if this device also loosens, even less bone is available should
the revision fail again. Revision hip surgery is unsurprisingly just as
controversial as primary THR and each case needs to be assessed on merit. The
stakes are high because revision surgery carries a significantly increased risk
of complications. The results are often less gratifying to the patient than the
original THR.

Diagrams above show the use of bone graft
to build up the proximal femur in a sequential fashion. A new stem and cup can
then be placed as shown below.

|