This is a review of 44 Souter elbow replacements and 55 Coonrad-Morrey Elbow replacements. The authors were interested in the survivorship of the two prosthesis designs over time.
The results demonstrate that the Mayo Elbow Performance scores were comparable in both groups with similar subjective satisfaction. Interestingly, the Souter elbow showed survivorship of 93% at 5 years and 76% at 10 years. The Coonrad-Morrey Elbow showed 100% survivorship at 5 years in the series. The authors conclude an inferior 5 years survivorship for the Souter prosthesis when compared to the Coonrad-Morrey prosthesis.
In this country, hinged prostheses are much more commonly employed than overseas where there is still support for unlinked designs. The significance of this review is that at least at 5 years, there appears to be a statistically significant difference between the survivorship of the Souter prosthesis when compared to the Coonrad-Morrey prosthesis. While unlinked designs would theoretically be beneficial for survivorship (less stress transfer to the bone-cement and stem-cement interfaces), this has not been bourn out clinically.