Nabarun Saha1, Partha Sarathi Sarkar2, Sagar Mukhopadhyay3, Sujit Narayan Nandi4, Kiran Kumar Mukhopadhyay5
BACKGROUND
The ‘floating shoulder’ is a rare injury consisting of ipsilateral fractures of the clavicle and glenoid neck. Although it may appear to be bony injury, studies suggest that ligamentous disruption associated with ipsilateral clavicle fracture and scapular neck fracture contributes to such entity. More commonly floating shoulder is defined as double disruption of the superior shoulder suspensory complex. Open reduction and internal fixation of both the fractures is the treatment of choice. We have made this study to assess clinical outcome after operative treatment of floating shoulder by DASH score.
MATERIALS AND METHODS
This is a study of 10 cases of floating shoulder injury operated in the same sitting by anterior approach for fracture clavicle and Judet’s posterior approach for scapula fracture from Jan 2014 to Oct 2016. All cases were assessed with DASH score at the end of six months.
RESULTS
Results of our study shows that majority of patients had excellent to good results with improvement in DASH score from 92.8 to 16.8 at final follow up. No major complications. All patients had radiological signs of union at the end of 1 year.
CONCLUSION
Surgical intervention should be considered for all floating shoulder injuries. open reduction and internal fixation not only increases stability but also to improves functional outcome of the patient. DASH score is an effective method to assess clinico-functional outcome in post-operative cases of floating shoulder.
