Failure of anterior shoulder instability repair caused by eyelet cutout of absorbable suture anchors.

Repair of soft tissue to bone is increasingly frequently performed using absorbable suture anchors. If a repair fails clinically, it is often impossible to identify the cause of failure at repeat surgery. We report on 2 cases of recurrence of instability after arthroscopic Bankart repair. In reoperation in these cases, all sutures were correctly knotted around the labrum but were intact and torn out of the anchor eyelets. No sign of anchor displacement (3 anchors in each patient) was seen. This is the first clinical report of unambiguous structural suture anchor failure. These observations emphasize the sensitivity of Bankart repair to weak links in the repair chain, which must be avoided.