How to Avoid the Most Devastating Complication After Shoulder Replacement

Here's the most devastating complication after reverse shoulder replacement and 3 tips to make sure this doesn't happen to you. With reverse shoulder replacement, one of the unique complications is an acromial stress fracture, and that occurs because the arm bone comes under the ball side. Because we have stability afforded by the way the joint is designed, you have to come under that ball. That puts increased tension on the acromion bone, which is the bone on the top of your shoulder. You can feel right here. The deltoid muscle inserts there, and that's what helps drive function, in particular after reverse replacement. So picture somebody going from not using their arm or not running, and all of a sudden they go out and use it a lot. In the case of the runner, they go out and run miles and miles. They can get a stress fracture because of a new position or new stress. So we want to avoid this because function is less if this occurs because it's so important for the function of the shoulder. So 3 tips to avoid this. Number 1, pay attention to your bone density. There's definitely a correlation with bone density. For people who are over the age 65, I get a DEXA scan. Number 2, I like to encourage people to do isometric isometric exercises against a wall prior to surgery, leading up to it. I believe that this can help strengthen the deltoid and strengthen the bone by receiving stress in advance. And number 3, our data shows that nutrition is really, really important. We found that people who start with lower nutrition have a higher risk of stress fracture. So you can modify your nutrition by increasing your protein prior to and after surgery, and we believe that can not only prevent stress fracture but may be one of the easiest levers to pull on of all those things to improve your outcome and avoid this devastating complication.