According to a recent narrative review published in the BMC Musculoskeletal Disorders, osteoarthritis of the elbow can be effectively and safely treated with the open and arthroscopic debridement procedures.

Elbow OA is considered as one of the major disabling infirmity due to severe pain and loss of function. Open and arthroscopic debridement is the favoured approach to manage this critical condition, but no consent is available to define which therapy is befitted to which class of patient or stage of the elbow OA. Therefore, researchers conducted this narrative review to understand elbow OA treatment prospects and related outcomes more comprehensively to implement a better treatment strategy. EMBASE, Google Scholar, PubMed, and Cochrane Library were searched for all potential studies with a set of inclusion and exclusion criteria using keywords like the elbow, open arthroscopy, osteoarthritis, debridement or ulnohumeral arthroplasty.

The analysis involved 229 studies. A total of 21 articles issued within 1994 and 2016 met the inclusion and exclusion criteria comprising 639 patients (651 elbows). The patients with open and arthroscopic procedure shows 31 and 26.8 Mayo elbow performance score/index (MEPS/MEPI), 37 and 18 total complication rate, and 28.6°, and 23.3° mean postoperative improvement, respectively. Because of the poor orthopaedics literature, this narrative review was not able to present which surgical approach is preferred over other, but the findings signify that both the open and arthroscopic debridement procedures are reliable and efficient for elbow OA treatment.