Partial Knee Replacement!

Hello,

 I am Dr. Shailendra Patil, consultant joint replacement and arthroscopic surgeon. Today we are going to talk about the new technology in joint replacement called as Partial Knee Replacement. As you know, nowadays arthritis is seen more and more in young population say like 40 to 50 years of patients. Coming to the partial knee replacement we need to understand about the pattern of arthritis. How does arthritis occur? Looking at this model the knee is composed of three compartments, the inner also called as the median, the outer also called as the lateral and the kneecap compartment also known as the Patella-Humoral compartment. In early stages, arthritis starts in either of these compartments and then it starts spreading to the other compartments.

Usually 80 to 90% of the cases it starts on the medial that is inner compartment. If we tackle the same patient at early stages so the patient can get away with partial knee replacement. As you can see in this diagram only the inner that is the medial compartment is affected in the patient so it make sense to change the only the affected compartment rather than changing the hole knee. So that is called as the partial knee replacement. What we do in this case- we just change the cap above, the cap below and a polyethylene white structure in between. In the partial knee replacement if you see, out of 100% we have changed only 30% and 70% remains as it is. That is God given knee remains as it is. So compared to the total knee replacement where we change everything, in partial knee replacement there is no need of changing the whole knee rather we can change the affected area. The advantage of partial knee replacement is that the naturalness of the knee remains, patient feels there as natural knee or their own knee. The activity level, the rehabilitation is much much faster as compared to the total knee replacement. It is as good as 3 times faster than the total knee replacement. The proscription is very very good. The patient like the partial knee replacement after the surgery as compared to the total knee replacement.

Thank you