Can We Identify Why Athletes Fail to Return to Sports After Arthroscopic Bankart Repair? A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis.

After shoulder stabilization surgery, most athletes hope to get back to their sport, but not everyone does, and it hasn't been entirely clear why. This review pooled findings from a set of studies on athletes who underwent arthroscopic Bankart repair, a common procedure for shoulder instability, to see how many failed to return to sports and what reasons they gave. Across the pooled data, about 1 in 6 athletes did not return to sports.

When athletes explained why, the vast majority pointed to shoulder-related issues rather than unrelated life factors, most often ongoing or recurrent instability, fear of reinjuring the shoulder, and apprehension during movement. Changes in personal priorities, lack of time, and discomfort with sports were mentioned less often. The interesting part is how consistently shoulder-specific concerns, rather than lifestyle changes, drove nonreturn.

The main limitation is that this synthesis relies on how individual studies asked athletes about their reasons, which can vary in detail and framing across the included research.

If you're recovering from arthroscopic Bankart repair, a surgery to fix a shoulder that keeps dislocating or feels unstable, you may wonder how likely you are to get back to your sport. This review combined data from several studies on athletes after this surgery and found that roughly 15 to 16 out of 100 did not return to sports.

That means most people did return, but a meaningful minority did not. When researchers asked those who didn't return why, most pointed to problems connected to the shoulder itself rather than unrelated life changes. The most common reasons were the shoulder still feeling unstable or giving out again, fear of hurting it again, and general apprehension about moving it the way sports require.

Fewer people cited things like losing interest, being too busy, or ongoing discomfort. This doesn't tell us what determines who returns and who doesn't, or how to prevent nonreturn. It simply shows that when return doesn't happen, shoulder-related worries are usually the driving factor, which may be useful context for understanding recovery expectations.

This is a summary of research, not medical advice. Talk to your own healthcare provider about anything affecting your care.

This systematic review and meta-analysis pooled 17 studies covering 813 athletes who underwent arthroscopic Bankart repair, calculating a weighted failure-to-return-to-sport rate of 15.6% (95% CI, 10.9%-21.1%) using a random-effects model. Among athletes who did not return, shoulder-dependent reasons were cited significantly more often than shoulder-independent reasons (81.7% vs 18.3%, P < .0001).

The most frequently reported specific reasons were recurrent or persistent instability (33.3%), fear of reinjury (17.7%), apprehension (9.9%), changes in priorities or personal interest (8.5%), lack of time (7.1%), and discomfort or pain with sports (6.4%). As a meta-analysis of observational data, the review inherits the reporting inconsistencies of its 17 source studies, particularly in how reasons for nonreturn were elicited and categorized, which were not standardized across studies. The abstract does not report formal heterogeneity statistics or a risk-of-bias assessment, so the precision and consistency of the pooled estimate cannot be fully judged from the given information.

The findings are descriptive rather than causal, identifying associated reasons for nonreturn rather than testing interventions or predictors, and should be interpreted as hypothesis-generating context for counseling discussions rather than definitive prognostic data.