Femoroacetabular Impingement Syndrome in Young Athletes: Surgical Enthusiasm and the Conservative Arm
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22548656Keywords:
Femoroacetabular impingement, Hip arthroscopy, Cam morphology, Physiotherapy, Young athletes, Hip painAbstract
Hip arthroscopy for femoroacetabular impingement (FAI) syndrome has grown rapidly since the cam
and pincer morphology description that gave the condition its modern surgical framework, yet cam
morphology itself is common in asymptomatic athletes on imaging, and randomised trials comparing
arthroscopic surgery against structured physiotherapy have found the two approaches produce
comparable outcomes at one-year follow-up, with surgery's advantage, where present, modest relative to
the scale of surgical uptake. This review synthesises the imaging-prevalence, randomised trial, and
physiotherapy-protocol literature on FAI syndrome in young athletes to characterise the gap between
surgical volume growth and the comparative-effectiveness evidence, and what the
conservative-management literature offers as a genuine first-line alternative rather than a default
fallback.
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