Foreword

Recent years have witnessed a growing number of people practising sports both at professional and amateur level. This trend led to a progressive rise in the incidence and prevalence of acute and chronic hip damage. The treatment of hip disease in subjects practising sports is a major challenge for the orthopaedic surgeon. The evaluation of patients, in particular those of young age with high functional demands, is inevitably complex and should be performed with a multidisciplinary approach; from a surgical point of view, it is essential to carefully assess whether the indication is towards conservative surgery or hip replacement surgery. The advent of arthroscopic surgery in recent years has allowed us to improve our knowledge of hip joint diseases, such as femoroacetabular impingement that is typical of sports and overuse activity. A correct and early diagnosis of the disease can direct the patient promptly to a conservative surgical treatment that could reduce the progression of degenerative pathology. However, when the joint is permanently damaged, the only reliable solution remains prosthetic surgery, leading to a series of issues that the orthopaedic surgeon should be able to master, leading to a thoughtful decision on, for example, which implant to use, which biomaterials, which surgical approach or which sport to practise after surgery. This supplement contains selected contributions stemming from the work performed by internationally recognised experts in the field and presented during the 1st European Hip Sport Meeting held in Bologna on May 19th, 20th, 2016 that we had the honour to co-chair. We hope that these contributions will help the orthopaedic surgeon, the sports physician and physiotherapist in their day-to-day practice, and will help in fulfilling our ultimate aim to improve the knowledge of the hip pathology related to sports and overuse activities.