Follow-up of intertrochanteric osteotomy of the hip during a 25-year period.

In 1984, in reporting follow-up on 67 hips in 61 patients who underwent intertrochanteric osteotomies for osteoarthritis of the hip, we found that between 12 and 15 years after osteotomy, 34% (23) of the 67 hips remained functional and the remainder had been converted to an arthroplasty. We now report on the fate of those osteotomies over a 25-year period. Ten patients with 10 osteotomies did not require an arthroplasty, having died without requiring conversion to total hip arthroplasty at an average of 18.3 years after osteotomy (range: 11 to 24.1 years). Two others were living at an average of 25.2 years after osteotomy without requiring conversion. Thus, for 18% of the hips, no further hip surgery was performed. For the remaining 55 hips in 49 patients, the osteotomy had served for an average of 9.8 years (range: 1.3 to 26.1 years) before requiring arthroplasty. The cumulative probability of osteotomy survival was 57.8% (standard error: 6.0%) at 10 years, 20.0% (standard error: 4.9%) at 20 years, and 5.7% (standard error: 2.9%) at 25 years by Kaplan-Meier survivorship analysis.