Incidence of hospital revisits and shoulder-related outcomes between two orthopedic sutures used for rotator cuff repair: what does the real-world evidence tell us?

BACKGROUND Rotator cuff tears cause burdensome pain impacting patients' daily use of their shoulder. We evaluated the outcomes after rotator cuff repair (RCR) utilizing two different high-tensile sutures.

METHODS A comparative study using a hospital dataset evaluated a novel high-tensile contractile suture, Dynacord, or a high-tensile non-contractile (NC) suture, FiberWire. The primary outcome was one-year all-cause hospital revisits. Secondary outcomes were shoulder-related hospital revisits and revisions defined as tendon transfer, RCR, or reverse shoulder arthroplasty. Propensity score weighting was applied and generalized linear models were used to analyze all outcomes.

RESULTS The cumulative incidence of one-year all-cause hospital revisits was significantly lower for the novel vs. the NC suture (32.5% vs. 37.0%; p-value: <0.001). The incidence of shoulder-related revisits was 10.6% vs. 13.9% and revision surgery overall was 1.4% vs. 1.4%; and for each revision surgery type, RCR was 1.3% vs. 1.1%, tendon transfer was 0.06% vs. 0.1%, and rTSA was 0.1% vs. 0.4%.

CONCLUSIONS Compared to the NC suture, use of the novel suture was associated with a significantly lower rate of all-cause hospital revisits within one year postoperatively, and a lower shoulder-related revisit rate. However, no difference was observed between groups in the overall revision surgery rate.