Abstract :
Introduction: Fracture neck of the talus associated with or without subtalar, tibiotalar joint and talonavicular
joint dislocation can be considered a devastating injuries to the ankle joint. Most of these cases
will complicate as osteonecrosis of body of talus, which takes very long time (years) for revascularization
even after prolonged non weight bearing. The present study reports the functional outcome of talus injuries,
which are treated with modified blair’s arthrodesis through anterior approach.
Materials and Methods: This is a prospective study conducted in katuri medical college & hospital,
Guntur, from July 2018 to January 2020. Total nine number of patients who were treated with modified
blair’s arthrodesis for talar neck fracture in nonunion and osteonecrosis were selected in this study. The
median interval between injury and index surgery was 6 weeks to 20 weeks. All the patients were followed
with serial radiographs and assessment of tibio pedal movement was done. Ankle joint functional outcome
after the surgery was assessed by rating systems such as visual analog scale and American orthopaedic foot
and ankle society score preoperatively and at follow up of 1 year.
Results: Tibio talar bony union was achieved in all cases at an average of 20Weeks. Five cases (55.5%) had
excellent results with 15-20 deg tibio pedal movements and four cases (44.4%) had good results with 10-15
deg of tibio pedal movements. In this study, postoperative American orthopaedic foot and ankle society
score was 85.44 5.20, P < 0>
51.3 16.19, P < 0> 1.05 to 0.44 0.88 at
follow up of 1 year (P value= 0.0001).
Conclusion: Good longterm results were achieved with modified blair’s arthrodesis. This technique has
high reliability in pain relief and with remaining tibio pedal motion patient can walk more physiologically
without any difficulty.
Keyword :
Talus, Fracture dislocation, Non-union, Osteonecrosis, Modified blair’s arthrodesis.