A new study revealed that arthroscopic knee surgery to trim degenerative cartilage tears may actually do more harm than good, according to a July 13 report from CBS News.
The research followed patients for 10 years after undergoing the knee procedure or “sham surgery,” a skin incision for knee pain. The study, which was published in the New England Journal of Medicine, is the first to show that the surgery left many patients worse off.
The study included middle-aged or older patients with knee pain and MRI scans showing cartilage tears; the results do not apply to tears from acute injuries.
“I don’t know how I would defend this procedure at all,” Teppo Järvinen, MD, PhD, head of the Finnish Centre for Evidence-Based Orthopaedics and one of the authors, said in the report. “What has been shown dramatically is that patients who have this procedure have more pain — they do worse. All the scores pointed in the same direction.”
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