Editorial Commentary: Rates of 5-Year Secondary Surgery After Hip Arthroscopy May Be Higher Than Reported: The Highs and Lows of the Administrative Database

Administrative claims databases have great power for clinical research, especially when used to evaluate trends from large cohorts. However, it should be noted that in these types of studies, patients in a database are treated at different time points, so some patients do not reach long-term follow-up by the end of the study period. Thus, such analyses require more stringent inclusion and exclusion criteria, which may significantly reduce the size of the included cohort. Recent research using the PearlDiver database has reported that the 5-year secondary surgery rate after hip arthroscopy is 4.9%. However, our research using the PearlDiver Mariner data set showed a 2-year reoperation rate after hip arthroscopy of 15%, and although most secondary surgical procedures occur within the first 2 years after hip arthroscopy, the 5-year reoperation rate may be higher. Readers should remain alert to the limitations of large database analyses.