Purpose: The purpose is to assess the diagnostic accuracy of a provocative test coined as the ‘posterior compression test’ (PCT) in those with the suspected posterior labral tear or lesion.

Methods: A total of 515 ‘arthroscopic labral repairs’ were identified between April 2013 and September 2020. Excluding those with concomitant shoulder pathologies, and only including those with pre-operative documentation of the PCT and/or the Jerk test, 191 patients were included. For the purposes of the analyses, the patients were divided into ‘non-posterior’ labral tear group which included the anterior labral tears and/or the superior labral anterior-to-posterior (SLAP) tears, versus ‘any posterior’ labral tear group which included the isolated posterior labral tears, the SLAP tears with posterior extension and the pan-labral tears.

Results: When the PCT was performed for the isolated posterior labral tears, the sensitivity was 92.6% with the specificity of 86.5%. The positive predictive value and negative predictive value were 71.4-97%, respectively. The Jerk test’s sensitivity was 77.8% but when the two tests were combined, the sensitivity increased up to 96.3%. The combined sensitivity with the Jerk test was still up to 94.6% with the AUC (area under curve) /ROC (receiver operator characteristic) at 0.855. Low ‘false-positive’ rate with the PCT was observed when the test was performed for the ‘non-posterior’ labral group, with the sensitivity of 13.5%.

Conclusions: The posterior compression test correlated well with the arthroscopic diagnoses in a subset of patients with suspected posterior labral pathology, possibly by means of direct stimulation.

Level of evidence: III; Diagnostic Study.