Maurizio De Pellegrin: Mythbusting and decoding hip dysplasia

Today I’m joined by Maurizio De Pellegrin from Parma, Italy, and we’re going to do something I enjoy: highlight a set of practical contributions, then stress-test what the data really support. We start with a question parents ask all the time—often more urgently than they ask about the hip itself: Will treatment delay my child’s milestones? De Pellegrin’s recent work examines walking age and motor development in severe DDH, and it helps us speak to families with greater precision about timing, severity, and what happens when treatment begins early.From there, we tackle a classic piece of folk remedy: double diapering. It’s common advice, it sounds plausible, and it persists. We’ll review what happens when you actually measure hip position with and without it, and what that should mean for pediatric counseling.Then we shift to ultrasound biology, what the labrum looks like, and how it changes in dysplastic and dislocated hips during stabilization. I’m especially interested in echogenicity: whether it’s a risk marker, a response marker, or both.Finally, we’ll go beyond typical DDH and discuss hip ultrasound in Hurler syndrome (MPS I) after hematopoietic stem cell gene therapy, what ultrasound can still tell us when anatomy is atypical, and what the next outcome questions should be.