Hip Surgery in Cerebral Palsy: A Bibliometric Analysis

Hip dislocation in cerebral palsy can lead to pain, pressure sores and difficulty with perineal hygiene. Hip surveillance programs have been implemented to identify patients who might benefit from early intervention and preventive strategies. Surgical techniques used to treat hip dislocation include soft tissue procedures, guided growth, osteotomies and salvage procedures. A search was conducted using Clarivate Web of Science Core Collection on 18 October 2022, to identify all studies of bony or soft tissue surgery for hip pathology in children with cerebral palsy. Fifty-nine original studies and reviews with at least 20 citations were included in this bibliometric analysis. We found that there has been an increase in studies over the decades, with the most studies being published in the Journal of Pediatric Orthopaedics. The United States of America was the most productive country, with Boston Children's Hospital and Harvard University publishing the most articles. The Methodological Index for Non-randomized Studies (MINORS) scoring system was used to analyse the methodological quality of included cohort studies, with the median score being 11 out of 18; many studies had no prospective calculation of study size and lacked control groups. Overall, the literature on this topic appears to be preferentially published in the Journal of Pediatric Orthopaedics, and influential papers by Hagglund 2005 and 2014 continue to be highly cited.