Abstract
INTRODUCTION
The literature suggests a survivorship of unicompartmental knee arthroplasties (UKA) for spontaneous osteonecrosisof the knee range from 93% to 96.7% at 10 to 12 years. However, these data arise from series reporting 23 to 33 patients, jeopardizing meaningful conclusions.
OBJECTIVES
Our purpose is to examine a long term survivorship of UKA's in a larger group of patients with SPONK, along with their subjective, symptomatic and functional outcome; to determine the percentage of failures and the reasons for the same in an attempt to identify relevant indications, contraindications, and technical parameters in treating SPONK with a modern implant design.
METHODS
We retrospectively evaluated 84 patients with late-stage spontaneous osteonecrosis of the knee who had a medial UKA from 1998 to 2005. All patients had preoperative MRI to confirm the diagnosis, exclude metaphyseal involvemente, and confirm the absence of major degenerative changes in the lateral and patellofermoal compartment. Mean age at surgery was 66 years and mean body mass index was 28.9. A Kaplan-Meier survival analysis was conducted using revision for any reason as the end point. The minimum followup of 63 months (mean, 98 months; range, 63–145 months).
RESULTS
The 10-year survivorship was 92%. Ten revisons were performed and the most common reasons for revision were subsidence of the tibial component (four) and aseptic loosening of the tibial component (three). No patient underwent revision for osteoarthritis progression in the lateral or patellofemoral compartment. There was a statistically significant difference between postoperative VAS, KSS, WOMAC, Oxford, Range of Motion and Tibial Slope (overcorrected by 3.7 degrees, p< 0.0023) between the survivors and the failures.
CONCLUSION
SPONK may be an optimal indication for UKA provided secondary osteonecrosis of the knee is ruled out; pre-operative MRI is performed to document involvement of other compartments, status of the ligaments and depth of lesion; and there is no over-correction in any plane.
