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Study finds women make more progress than men soon after TKA
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Women recover from total knee arthroplasty more quickly than men, according to an article published online in Clinical Orthopaedics and Related Research by German investigators.
The study went on to note that although men take longer to recover, they catch up to women after the 1-year mark — meaning there are no differences in final outcomes.
“We do not know yet why women recover faster from surgery than men,” Thoralf R. Liebs, MD, and his co-authors wrote in the study. “It could be because of women’s lower preoperative health-related quality of life, whereby they have more to gain from surgery, or because of other speculative factors such as different postoperative activity levels, psychological factors or different utilization of treatment. It is too early to say.”
Liebs and his group performed a retrospective analysis of prospectively collected data from three multicenter randomized controlled trials, all with the function of rehabilitation measure evaluation following total knee arthroplasty. With an overall cohort of 494 patients — 141 men and 353 women — the investigators looked at self-reported physical function at 3-, 6-, 12- and 24-months postoperatively, as well as leg-specific stiffness and pain.
On average, women in the study were 3 years older and had less mean physical function, greater stiffness and greater mean pain scores compared with men.
The findings showed women demonstrated greater improvements in function — as well as less pain — than men at the 3- and 6-month marks. At the 12- and 24-month marks, however, the group found no differences in improvement between the genders. When the authors took age, body mass index and co-morbidities into account, the differences remained at the 3-month mark but not at the 6-month mark.
References:
- Liebs TR, et al. Women recover faster than men after standard knee arthroplasty. Clin Orthop Relat Res. 2011. doi: 10.1007/s11999-011-1921-z
- www.springer.com
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