What’s New in Pediatric Orthopaedics

Abstract

This pediatric orthopaedic update represents a review of articles predominantly from October 2021 to October 2022. Spine Adolescent Idiopathic ScoliosisAs we strive toward optimal adolescent idiopathic scoliosis treatment that will serve patients well into adulthood, longterm follow-up studies are of particular importance. Lander et al. reported on a series of 134 patients treated with Harrington instrumentation with a minimum 40-year follow-up. Patients with a lowest instrumented vertebra (LIV) at L3 or proximal had a lower likelihood of undergoing additional surgical procedures at 13% compared with patients with an LIV at L4 or distal at 36%, but, aside from this, the groups were similar with regard to health-related quality of life and their scores were not different from normal age-based means 11 . Also encouraging was the report on 115 patients with a 25year follow-up that showed that the serum levels of cobalt and chromium ions were similar in the patients treated with Harrington instrumentation compared with a control group of patients treated with bracing 12 . However, questions with regard to the long-term effect of retained implants continue to generate concern as titanium levels were found to be persistently elevated to 5 times the preoperative level at the 2-year follow-up in a series with more contemporary implants 13 . The impact of this remains unknown but warrants continued study.There remains continued interest in leveraging technology to achieve optimal pedicle screw placement safely and consistently. In a systematic review and meta-analysis by Baldwin et al., screws placed with intraoperative computed tomographic (CT) navigation were determined to be one-third Disclosure: The Disclosure of Potential Conflicts of Interest forms are provided with the online version of the article (http://links.lww.com/JBJS/H355).