week 0 · last reviewed 2026-06-11
PAO recovery: week 0
Clinical procedure: Periacetabular osteotomy (PAO).
Typical, evidence-anchored estimate only. It is not medical advice, not a prediction for your body, and not a substitute for your surgeon or clinician.
what's typical at week 0
typical pain · week 0
Around week 0, the typical pain band sits at 5.9/10 (range 4–7.8). This week was measured directly in the cited cohort.
weeks 0–2
Weeks 0-2 · the hospital fortnight
The first days are the hardest of the whole arc. A daily diary study that followed PAO patients by automated text message put average pain at 5.9/10 on the first day, 4.7/10 at one week, and 4.1/10 at two weeks — with wide spreads in both directions. Anesthesia teams increasingly use regional blocks (a TAP-block trial cut 48-hour opioid use roughly in half), so your day-one experience depends partly on what was infused before you woke up.
Mobilization starts surprisingly early: most protocols have you up on crutches with foot-flat, roughly 20-25%-of-body-weight contact by day one or two. That isn't walking in any meaningful sense — it's teaching the leg the pattern while the pelvis is protected. Opioid use in the diary cohort peaked around day eight and was essentially zero by week six.
If your pain is rising rather than falling after the first week, or the leg stops tolerating the protected touch-down it previously tolerated, call your surgical team. The modal trajectory is steady decline from day one.
documented at this week
This week
Foot-flat weight bearing, by consensus
The expert consensus is 25% foot-flat weight bearing for the first 6-8 weeks, with hip flexion limited to 90° and external rotation to 20° in the first 4-6 — the osteotomy needs time to unite.
The pattern
Pain medication tapers fast
In the diary cohort, opioid use fell from 5 tablets on day one to ~2 by day 14 and zero by week 6 — and patients used less than half (44%) of what was prescribed.
milestones around now
- wk 0 ·Protected partial weight-bearing with crutches (~20-25% body weight, foot-flat) (From POD 1 through 6-8 weeks; 6 wk in ~21% of protocols, 8 wk in ~18%, full published span 2-16 wk)
sources
What this page is built from
- Postoperative weight-bearing restrictions and rehabilitation after PAO: systematic review (63 studies) meta-analysis · reliability 9/10
- Rehabilitation guidelines following PAO: North American Delphi consensus (Disantis et al., IJSPT 2022) society guideline · reliability 9/10
- Patient-reported outcomes of PAO: prospective ANCHOR cohort (Clohisy et al., JBJS 2017, n=391) prospective cohort · reliability 9/10
- Pain reduction up to two years after PAO, rest vs activity (Jakobsen et al., Aarhus, pain cohort n=299) prospective cohort · reliability 8/10
- Daily postoperative pain and opioid use after PAO via automated mobile messaging (Bryan et al. 2020, n=29) prospective cohort · reliability 8/10
- PAO activity levels and return to sport: systematic review (J Hip Preserv Surg 2024) meta-analysis · reliability 8/10
- Anticipating time taken off work after Bernese PAO (2025, n=242) prospective cohort · reliability 8/10
Track your own week-by-week so a flare doesn't erase the months behind it.
Start a recovery logThis is a typical, evidence-anchored reading of pao recovery at week 0 — not medical advice, not a prediction for your body, and not a substitute for your surgeon or clinician.