Investigation of the priority among the roentgenogram measurements in acetabular dysplasia.

PURPOSE There are many radiographic parameters to evaluate developmental dysplasia of the hip joint (DDH); however, the priority between the parameters is unclear. We evaluated the priority of radiographic parameters in DDH. METHODS We retrospectively reviewed the radiographs of 82 consecutive patients aged above 85 years without hip osteoarthritis (OA; no osteoarthritis (NO) group), and 28 patients with early stage hip OA were set as the control group (OA group). We used the linear discriminant analysis (LDA) to consider the priority of the following parameters: acetabular roof obliquity (ARO), center-edge (CE) angle, Sharp angle, acetabular head index (AHI), and acetabular depth ratio (ADR). RESULTS The LDA of five different parameters revealed that the NO and OA groups could be almost distinguished with 83.6% accuracy (p < 0.0001, Wilks' lambda test). The standardized scoring coefficients were as follows: ARO, -0.23; CE, -0.43; Sharp, -0.29; AHI, 0.97; and ADR, 0.11. The AHI was particularly noticeable in the NO group. CONCLUSION Dissociation of the AHI in the OA group was significantly higher than that of the other parameters in the OA group compared to the parameters in the NO group. A small AHI may be a risk parameter for hip OA due to DDH.