TKA: STANDING ALIGNMENT DOESN’T PREDICT DYNAMIC ALIGNMENT (Orthopedics This Week)
Do you really need to aim for a straight limb when doing a total knee arthroplasty (TKA)?
The jury is out, but researchers from the UK and France have new evidence that says “no.”
Their work, “Does standing limb alignment after total knee arthroplasty predict dynamic alignment and knee loading during gait?” was published online March 24, 2017 in The Knee.
Charles Rivière, M.D., Ph.D. a consulting orthopedic surgeon at the MSK Lab, Imperial College London told OTW, “Postoperative standing frontal limb alignment has recently been shown to have little effect on clinical outcomes of mechanically aligned (MA) TKA. We thought the reason was maybe the poor relationship between standing (static) and dynamic (gait) frontal limb alignment.”
“We designed a prospective study to assess this question. The study included 35 patients operated with a MA posterior stabilized TKA who had a postoperative assessment of their standing (full leg X-ray) and dynamic (gait analysis for level walking) alignments plus their dynamic adduction moment.”
“The standing alignment was found to be of poor value to predict the dynamic al...
