Knee arthroscopies: who gets them, what does the radiologist report, and what does the surgeon find?

摘要

Background and purpose — Several randomized controlled trials have not shown any added benefit of arthroscopy over placebo surgery or physiotherapy in middle-aged patients with knee symptoms without trauma. We studied the characteristics of the knee arthroscopies performed in southern Sweden.Patients and methods — From the orthopedic surgical records from 2007–2009 in the Sk?ne region of Sweden (with a population of 1.2 million), we retrieved ICD-10 diagnostic codes and selected all 4,096 arthroscopies that were diagnosed peroperatively with code M23.2 (derangement of meniscus due to old tear or injury) or code M17 (knee osteoarthritis). We extracted information on cartilage and meniscus status at arthroscopy, and we also randomly sampled 502 of these patients from the regional archive of radiology and analyzed the preoperative prevalence of radiographic or magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)-defined osteoarthritis.Results — 2,165 (53%) of the 4,096 arthroscopies had the diagnostic code M23.2 or M17. In this...