Background: Different surgical procedures have been described for the treatment of the recurrent ante-rior dislocation of the shoulder. Despite the documented success of the open procedures, some studies suggest that the arthroscopic technique leads to more favorable results. However, there still seems to be some disagreement concerning the incidence of complications, when comparing open and arthroscopic techniques.

Objective and methods: As an attempt to clarify these doubts about the incidence of complications associ-ated with the different techniques, this study contains a free literature review along with a retrospective case series of the patients who underwent these procedures in an University hospital in the past 10 years. Discussion and conclusion: There are various techniques for the treatment of the recurrent dislocation of the shoulder, all of them with known success when it comes to prevention of recurrence. However, all of them are invariably associated with high complication rates.

Despite being associated with a slightly higher re-operation rate, in the literature, the arthroscopic tech-nique was found to have an overall lower rate of complications when compared to the open procedures. Centro Hospitalar São João (CHSJ) presented a higher rate of screw related complications and revision surgery than the literature. However, concerning other complications and when assessing the proce-dures individually, no tendency was verified. One can therefore conclude that, despite being scarce, the Centro Hospitalar São João CHSJ data roughly overlap the literature.