Studies on knee cartilage lesions generally report controversial results comparing findings of men and women treated with regenerative procedures, although they are based on small patients’ number and short-term follow-ups. The aim of this study was to evaluate differences between sexes in long-term outcomes in patients affected by knee cartilage lesions treated with matrix-assisted autologous chondrocyte transplantation (MACT) technique.
A total of 217 patients (155 males and 62 females) were evaluated with the International Knee Documentation Committee (IKDC) subjective score at a minimum 10-year follow up after treatment with MACT for knee chondral lesions. The standardization of the IKDC scores was performed according to the mean score typical for the corresponding age/sex category in a healthy population. A further analysis was performed on a subgroup to compare more homogeneous patients.
The mean follow-up was 14.0 ± 3.4 years (range 10-22 years). Women reported a statistically significant lower IKDC score than men (64.0 ± 23.3 vs 76.1 ± 20.5, respectively) (p<0.0005). The subgroup analysis did not confirm this difference (63.2 ± 23.2 vs 71.7 ± 22.0, respectively) (p>0.05). Finally, the score standardization confirmed the lack of differences between sexes in the total population (-1.8 ± 1.6 vs -1.5 ± 2.0, respectively) (p>0.05) as well as in the homogeneous group analysis (-1.9 ± 1.6 vs -1.7 ± 2.0, respectively) (p>0.05).
This analysis on patients with knee chondral lesions treated with MACT confirmed that women’s outcome was lower than men in the general population at long-term follow-up. However, when homogeneous populations were considered, also with standardized scores based on gender and sex, no differences between sexes were observed.