What benefits does hip preserving surgery bring?

 Conservative surgery of the hip has important benefits:

• It may improve or eliminate symptoms of pain and limited mobility resulting from anatomical changes that have a predisposition for the appearance of degenerative conditions (osteoarthritis) (see section "What diseases can your hip have?")
• It may prevent or delay the development of hip osteoarthritis, depending on pre-existing lesions in the hip.
• Allows resuming a normal life without the need to resort to artificial implants, including resuming sports practice at a high level competition.
• Does not have the potential complications that surgery with prosthesis placement has, e.g. infection, intolerance to metals and shift of artificial components.

The various possible techniques to achieve stabilizing the hips anatomy are:

• Conventional open surgery with surgical hip dislocationa (see section "Surgical hip dislocation") which allows full access to the hip joint for treatment of all lesions of the femoroacetabular impingement (see section "What is femoroacetabular impingement?"). Allowing correction of hip deformities much more complex with significant anatomical changes of the femoral neck, including disease of the hip in infants (see sections  "The normal child and adolescent hip"  and "Hip dysplasia and femoroacetabular impingement")

• Arthroscopy of the hip (see section "Arthroscopy of the hip") has been increasingly used to treat the femoroacetabular impingement, especially when the sector posteroinferior of the joint is not involved. The access is made through 2 or 3 lateral and anterior portals with partial opening of the capsule and exposing the central and peripheral compartment of the joint using traction on the limb with a suitable device. The procedures implemented are similar to those of open surgery. It may be used to treat infant hip conditions (see section "Perthes Disease").

• Periacetabular osteotomy is used when the problem is essentially a bad position of the acetabulum and correction should be made with a specific surgery, known as "bernese" or Ganz osteotomy, which allows a three-dimensional shift of the acetabulum. This osteotomy, technically complex, involves separating an iliac bone fragment that contains the acetabulum with the corresponding perfusing arteries, using a single anterior incision. (see section "Bernese" Periacetabular Osteotomy).

• Mini-invasive approach is used in some medical centers to treat femoroacetabular impingement. Regarding arthroscopy it does not have advantages nor does it allow access to the posterior compartments of the hip.