Knee

摘要

The increasing burden of osteo-arthritis in an ageing population is well known, and despite a plethora of doom-mongering predictive papers a few years ago, there has been little in the recent literature to confirm if the rising tide is indeed, as they claim, rising! An epidemiology team in Melbourne (Australia) have published one of the first studies to accurately quantify this increase. The major strength of this paper is in quite how comprehensive the dataset is, the investigators having reviewed data from Australia, Demark, Finland, Norway and Sweden. They used the long-standing and established population registries in these countries to compare the lifetime risk of primary total knee arthroplasty (TKA) for osteoarthri-tis (OA) in five countries, and to describe a change in lifetime risk over a ten-year period. The incidence of TKAs performed annually in patients aged 60 years or younger increased over the study period in all countries by up to 5.1%. The proportion of TKAs performed for those patients aged 80 years or older decreased over the ten-year period in all countries except Finland.