Simple, Cost-Effective Technique to Create a Double-Loaded Suture Anchor from a Non-loaded Suture Anchor

INTRODUCTION: Suture anchors are used in the repair of rotator cuff repair, bankart’s repair, SLAP repair, tendoachilles avulsion type injury, bony avulsion of medial collateral ligament of the knee, etc. The cost of preloaded suture anchors varies from INR 4500 to 10,000. Double-loaded suture anchors are better than single-loaded suture anchors in terms of having more hold in the soft tissues and having multiple anchoring points. Non-loaded screw type suture anchors are available with their inserter devices through which one suture stranded can be passed to create single-loaded suture anchor. However, passing two sutures through the eyelet of the suture anchor and subsequently passing two sutures through the long tubular cannulated suture anchor inserter device can be fiddly, time-consuming and difficult to pass because the sutures can get entangled within this device and not pass inside the inserter device. Hence, a technique was devised to simultaneously pass both sutures through the eyelet of the suture anchor and subsequently through the suture anchor inserter device. This method of loading suture anchors has not been described previously in literature. TECHNIQUE: A single number 1–0 Ethilon is used to shuttle two sutures of number 2 Ethibond through the suture anchor insertion device after passing the two Ethibond sutures through the eyelet of a 5mm non-loaded suture anchor. This technique saves considerable time during the surgical procedure and can be easily taught to scrub nurses. The greatest cost benefit is seen in cases where more than two suture anchors have to be inserted. The above technique has been used in patients with rotator cuff repair, biceps tenodesis, tendoachilles avulsion repair with great degree of success and no case of failure of suture or suture anchor seen in any of the cases. CONCLUSION: The cost of a double-loaded suture anchor using our method is INR 1950 which is much cheaper compared to the available preloaded suture anchors. This is a novel, time saving, simple, cheap, and easy and easily replicable method to create an effective twin-loaded suture anchor from a non-loaded suture anchor.