Pre- and Post-Operative Gait Analysis of Hip Osteoarthritic Patients Fitted with Ceramic Autophor Total Hip Replacement

Abstract

A number of gait parameters were recorded and analysed for two groups of patients. Group A consisted of hip osteoarthritic patients, examined just prior to operation. Group B consisted of patients fitted with a ceramic Autophor hip replacement, following hip osteoarthritis. The measuring system was a conductive walkway in conjunction with a dual light-beam/photocell sub-system. Analysis included comparisons of the gait parameters between the patients and the normals taken from the literature, between the two sides of each patient, and between the two groups. Values for group B, in general, showed an improvement, compared with those for group A, but they were still inferior to the corresponding values for normals.