Women Have Poorer Knee Surgery Recovery

The factors linked to poor knee surgery short-term recovery appear different than those that mar long-term outcome of the same surgery, says a U.S. study.

We found that women showed poorer short-term recovery than men in the first year following arthroscopic meniscal tear removal surgery, and people with osteoarthritis also did not do as well as others, principal investigator Peter Fabricant, a medical student at Yale University School of Medicine in New Haven, Conn., said in a statement.

The factors associated with a poorer long-term outcome, such as larger tear size, greater amount of tissue removed, advanced patient age, and higher body mass index, are not the same as those we can associate with short-term surgical recovery.

Fabricant and colleagues at Yale University studied 126 patients who underwent arthroscopic partial meniscectomy to assess the impact of obesity, age, gender, amount of tissue removed and degenerative joint changes on short-term recovery.

The researchers found that being female and the extent of osteoarthritis were associated with a less-than-optimal first-year recovery.

The findings were presented at the annual meeting of the American Orthopaedic Society for Sports Medicine at the Telus Convention Center in Calgary, Alberta.