Today’s primary UKR may become tomorrow’s complicated revision (OrthoSuperSite)
PRAGUE — Researchers at London’s Chelsea and Westminster Hospital discovered in their recent analysis of register-based unicompartmental and total knee arthroplasty revision cases that the procedures were more complicated than primary cases due to increases in bone loss and use of constrained prostheses.
Using polyethylene bearing thickness as a surrogate for bone loss in their analysis of data in the National Joint Registry (NJR) for England and Wales, Khaled Sarraf and colleagues found mean bearing thicknesses of 10.43 mm for straightforward primary total knee replacement (TKR) that increased to as much as 14.86 mm for some revision TKRs in the registry.
According to results that Sarraf presented at the SICOT XXV Triennial World Congress 2011 here, revising a unicompartmental knee replacement (UKR) to a TKR proved most challenging, with a mean thickness of 12.79 mm for the revision polyethylene inserts used in those circumstances.
“Constrained knee replacements were used in 4.9% of UKR-to-TKR revision in comparison to 2.15% of primary TKR,” according to the abstract.
Sarraf said in his p...
