Management of medial compartment knee arthritis with unicompartimental arthroplasty: our experience

OBJECTIVES: the purpose of this presentation is to review the indications and benefits for the use of the Unicompartimental Knee Arthroplasty (UKA) for the treatment of the anteromedial osteoarthritis of the knee, and to make an early report of our series. METHODS: 37 UKA were performed by our group between 2013 y 2016, as a first experience, with 22 male patients and 15 females. The limit ages were 28 and 85 years. All received a Vangard PFR System (Zimmer Biomet Warsaw In). RESULTS: All the patients reported a better life quality, and the main difference that we noticed is the subjective feeling that the operated knee felt “like own” by the patients, which is consistent with the fact that the ligaments were intact, even in the 6 cases where we performed an ACL reconstruction, (although we know that the stable knee is a known prerequisite for this kind of surgery). CONCLUSION: The unicondilar knee replacement is a technically demanding procedure that requires a careful patient selection and a steep learning curve, but even in this short series, we agree with most of the recent papers that state the benefits of the UKA, and we are looking to start a prospective series of cases to evaluate the outcomes with functional scores.