A look at arthroscopic treatment of patients with degenerative knees

An arthroscopic surgery performed to treat the osteoarthritic knee is one of the most common medical treatments done worldwide with more than 700,000 such procedures performed annually in the United States, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. However, some studies and physicians question the benefits this procedure provides to patients with degenerative knees.

Recently, evidence has shown that arthroscopic surgery to treat a knee with osteoarthritis (OA) has little benefit. The small benefits patients gained from the procedure tend to be short-lived, Andrew Carr, ChM, DSc FRCS, FMedSci, of the Nuffield Department of Orthopaedics, Rheumatology and Musculoskeletal Sciences, in Oxford, United Kingdom, said in a 2015 editorial in the British Medical Journal. He noted evidence for the procedure is weak and lacks high-quality, multicenter randomized control trials in its favor.

Carr wrote, “Researchers have already reported that trials of arthroscopic surgery find no benefit over control interventions ranging from exercises to placebo surgery.” According to Carr, many orthopaedic surgeons have fallen prey to their biases and ignored the “robust and high quality evidence” against the procedure. Instead, he noted, they lean on their entrenched attitudes toward the benefit of arthroscopic surgery to treat osteoarthritic knees.

Click here to read the full story in the November/December issue of Orthopaedics Today Europe.