The treatment of cartilage has continuously evolved since 1980. The arthroscopic cartilage mincing technique is an open procedure for the one-stage autologous transplantation of cartilage chips, which are fixed with fibrin glue and PRP. Initial studies showed positive results in the short term of up to 12 months. The aim of this study is now to find out whether there are patients who respond best to this surgical procedure and what characterizes these patients.
In this study, 100 patients were analyzed and the results were evaluated after 6 months based on 5 criteria - BMI, age, gender, smoker, and insurance type. These criteria were compared using linear multivariate regression and tested for comparability. All patients participated for the first 6 months. The following 5 scores were recorded: VAS, KOOS, KOOS ADL, SANE and Tegner.
In the first 6 months, all patients improved significantly in the KOOS, KOOS ADL and VAS. In the comparison between smokers and non-smokers, there were no differences in all scores 6 months after the intervention. BMI was classified according to WHO criteria (<18.5/18.5-24.9/25.0-29.9/30.0-34.9/35.0-39.9/>40) and showed no difference between groups. Age was categorized into 4 years of life (<29/30-39/40-49/>50) where it can also be seen that there is no difference between the groups. For gender there were also no significant differences between the sexes in all scores. The medians between the two types of insurance in Germany (public-private) are almost identical in the individual scores.
According to our analysis, all patients were highly suitable for autologous minced cartilage joint repair and presented significant improvements in all clinical scores without any differences in the selected subgroups. It is recommended to re-evaluate this analysis after 12 and 24 months and to increase the number of cases.