A study of sixty-eight cases of juvenile rheumatoid arthritis in conjunction with a review of the literature resulted in the establishment of criteria defining indications for synovectomy which make it extremely unlikely that remission would have occurred without surgical treatment.
Evaluation of forty-eight synovectomies in fourteen patients after an average follow-up of two years (range, eighteen to thirty-two months) established to our satisfaction that the procedure is not unusually hazardous in children.
Results of synovectomy depend on good postoperative therapy as well as on technically adequate surgery. Our short-term results lead us to conclude that the benefits generally seem to outweigh the disadvantages of performing synovectomy in growing children who have this disease.