Undergoing knee surgery may not be beneficial at all. According to a new study, patients who undergo simulated knee surgery fared just as well as those who got the real procedure, raising questions on the benefit of the most common orthopedic procedure in the United States. The findings also supported strings of papers that suggest arthroscopic partial meniscectomy does not help many patients.
"It's a well-done study," said Dr. David Jevsevar, chairman of the committee on evidence-based quality and value of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons. "It gives further credence or support to a number of studies that have shown that giving arthroscopy to patients is not always going to make a difference."
Researchers in Finland conducted the study on two sets of patients who either received the surgery or were led to believe that they had. After one year, the researchers observed that there were no significant differences in improvement between the two groups. Nearly two-thirds of patients in each group reported they were happy with the results.
The researchers said that although the surgery did provide a slight advantage in certain areas early on, such as a decrease in pain felt after exercising, the differences disappeared by the end of the twelfth month.
Jeffrey Katz, a professor of medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston said that the implications of the study are fairly profound. "There may be some relatively small advantages to meniscal surgery, but they're short-lived," he said.
As many as 700,000 people undergo arthroscopic partial meniscectomy in the United States each year but the procedure came under scrutiny with the publication of several papers that found it provides little or no benefit in older patients whose meniscus is frayed due to simple wear and tear as opposed to a specific injury.
"Those who do research have been gradually showing that this popular operation is not of very much value," said Dr. David Felson, a professor of medicine and epidemiology at Boston University. The study "provides information beautifully about whether the surgery that the orthopedist thinks he or she is doing is accomplishing anything," Felson, who was not involved in the research, said.
"I think often the answer is no," he added.
