Effects of Total Hip Arthroplasty on Gait

The hip joint transfers upper body load to the lower limbs and plays an important role in maintaining balance and stability during locomotion. Muscles around the hip joint are also the major postural muscles in our body. A diseased hip joint experiences diminished function affecting the activity of daily living gravely. Furthermore, being a part of the closed kinetic chain, as the disease progresses, problems originating at the hip joint start showing effects on the neighboring joints including the pelvis, knee, ankle, and spine. The gold standard treatment for end-stage hip disease is total hip arthroplasty (THA). From a clinical perspective, total hip replacement is considered to be one of the most successful orthopedic surgeries in terms of patient outcome, based on self-reported questionnaires for health status. However, gait, being the major function of the hip joint, tends not to be assessed objectively in the outcome analysis of THA surgery. In research settings, THA has consistently shown a positive outcome with improved gait parameters compared to preoperative analysis. Note that this recovery is still not reported to be 100% in comparing to healthy controls and, as a result, objective assessment data during the early postoperative period can also be used to help design tailor-made rehabilitation protocols for individual patients, optimizing outcome results. This chapter details gait alteration in hip arthritis and improvement in gait following THA.