Arthroscopic surgery for degenerative knee: systematic review and meta-analysis of benefits and harms
Five articles on PainSci cite Thorlund 2015: 1. The Complete Guide to Patellofemoral Pain Syndrome 2. Your Back Is Not Out of Alignment 3. Should You Get A Lube Job for Your Arthritic Knee? 4. Knee Surgery Sure is Useless! 5. Knee Replacement Surgery Doubts
PainSci commentary on Thorlund 2015: ?This page is one of thousands in the PainScience.com bibliography. It is not a general article: it is focused on a single scientific paper, and it may provide only just enough context for the summary to make sense. Links to other papers and more general information are provided wherever possible.
A review of nine studies presenting strong collective evidence that meniscectomy is a futile surgery for most patients, and with significant risk of harms to boot. For a good plain language overview of this topic, see Kolata.
original abstract †Abstracts here may not perfectly match originals, for a variety of technical and practical reasons. Some abstacts are truncated for my purposes here, if they are particularly long-winded and unhelpful. I occasionally add clarifying notes. And I make some minor corrections.
OBJECTIVE: To determine benefits and harms of arthroscopic knee surgery involving partial meniscectomy, debridement, or both for middle aged or older patients with knee pain and degenerative knee disease.
DESIGN: Systematic review and meta-analysis.
MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Pain and physical function.
DATA SOURCES: Systematic searches for benefits and harms were carried out in Medline, Embase, CINAHL, Web of Science, and the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials (CENTRAL) up to August 2014. Only studies published in 2000 or later were included for harms.
ELIGIBILITY CRITERIA FOR SELECTING STUDIES: Randomised controlled trials assessing benefit of arthroscopic surgery involving partial meniscectomy, debridement, or both for patients with or without radiographic signs of osteoarthritis were included. For harms, cohort studies, register based studies, and case series were also allowed.
RESULTS: The search identified nine trials assessing the benefits of knee arthroscopic surgery in middle aged and older patients with knee pain and degenerative knee disease. The main analysis, combining the primary endpoints of the individual trials from three to 24 months postoperatively, showed a small difference in favour of interventions including arthroscopic surgery compared with control treatments for pain (effect size 0.14, 95% confidence interval 0.03 to 0.26). This difference corresponds to a benefit of 2.4 (95% confidence interval 0.4 to 4.3) mm on a 0-100 mm visual analogue scale. When analysed over time of follow-up, interventions including arthroscopy showed a small benefit of 3-5 mm for pain at three and six months but not later up to 24 months. No significant benefit on physical function was found (effect size 0.09, -0.05 to 0.24). Nine studies reporting on harms were identified. Harms included symptomatic deep venous thrombosis (4.13 (95% confidence interval 1.78 to 9.60) events per 1000 procedures), pulmonary embolism, infection, and death.
CONCLUSIONS: The small inconsequential benefit seen from interventions that include arthroscopy for the degenerative knee is limited in time and absent at one to two years after surgery. Knee arthroscopy is associated with harms. Taken together, these findings do not support the practise of arthroscopic surgery for middle aged or older patients with knee pain with or without signs of osteoarthritis.
This page is part of the PainScience BIBLIOGRAPHY, which contains plain language summaries of thousands of scientific papers & others sources. It’s like a highly specialized blog. A few highlights:
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