Simple Walking Test can definitely help Plan Hip Replacements

A quick 10-meter walk before surgery can help doctors and patients figure out the best time for a hip replacement and what to expect during recovery.

Study: Preoperative Gait Speed as a Predictor of Patient-Reported Outcomes After Total Hip Arthroplasty – Insights from Patient Acceptable Symptom state and K-Means Clustering Analyses. Image Credit: DmyTo / Shutterstock.com

A recent study published in The Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery shows that how fast someone walks before surgery is a good sign of how well thay will do after a hip replacement for hip osteoarthritis.

Recovery Varies Between People

A hip replacement is a surgery to help people move better when they have severe hip problems,often caused by osteoarthritis. The surgery usually works well long-term, but people recover and feel better at different rates.

Right now, doctors don’t have a lot of strong evidence to help them decide when is the best time to do a hip replacement. This means it’s critically important to find ways to predict how well someone will recover before the surgery.

Doctors often ask patients about their health and how they feel to see if a treatment is working. In this study, researchers at Kyushu University in Japan looked at whether data about a patient’s health, collected from p