Prevalence of Radiographic Hip Dysplasia in the General Adult Population: A Systematic Review

Acetabular dysplasia has a wide range of prevalence reported in the literature. This variation is likely due to differences in the population under investigation and studies focusing on cohorts with hip pain and osteoarthritis. There are reports of radiographic hip dysplasia prevalence for adults without hip pain but there is no systematic review of these studies to document the incidence in the general population. The purpose of this systematic review was to provide a full summary of all studies that report prevalence of hip dysplasia in adults without hip pain.

PRISMA guidelines were utilized as an outline for this systematic review. Articles were pulled from PubMed, OVID Medline, Embase, SCOPUS, Cochrane Central Register of Clinical Trials, and clinicaltrials.gov from their inception dates to 1/7/24. Studies were included if participants were asymptomatic and reported rates of prevalence.

Fourteen studies were included in this systematic review. There were 10,998 hips from 5,506 participants included in this analysis. The overall prevalence of radiographic hip dysplasia was 2.3%. Eight studies of 5,930 hips reported the prevalence of hip dysplasia by sex. The prevalence rate in these studies was 3.8% in females and 2.7% in males.

Acetabular dysplasia based on radiographic measurements is relatively common in the general adult population. Furthermore, females have a higher prevalence rate when compared to males. It is important to recognize the incidence of hip dysplasia in the asymptomatic adult population as we recommend surgical treatment for patients who present with hip pain and dysplasia. Further studies should investigate the natural history of untreated and treated hip dysplasia. Level of Evidence: III.