Purpose

The purpose of the present work was to present a long term, 10-year follow-up of clinical results with a fully arthroscopic technique of collagen matrix-based meniscus repair (AMMR) combined with the injection of bone marrow aspirate into the area of the meniscal lesion.

Methods and Materials

53 patients underwent AMMR. The 2-year follow-up period was achieved in 50 cases and a 5 year follow-up – by 44 patients. The present study 23 patients who were available at 10 years. 21 patients who were could not come for a follow-up due to: 11 the Covid-19 pandemic, 4 we lost contact, 6 changed the country of residence. The study group consisted of 6 females (26%) and 17 males (74%). 16 patients underwent an isolated AMMR surgery and in 7 cases AMMR was combined with the ACL reconstruction (AMMR+ACL). The subjective outcomes were evaluated using an form IKDC 2000 and the Lysholm knee scoring scale. WORMS was used to perform the multi-feature, whole-organ assessment of the knee using magnetic resonance images.

Results

The overall results of the WORMS indicated a statistically significant decrease when compared to the 5-year follow-up (p< 0.01) in the group of all patients, as shown in Table 1. Differences were not observed when both subgroups were analyzed separately. Moreover, the difference in the postoperative MRI results for AMMR and AMMR + ACLR groups were not significant at the 10-year follow-up study.

Improvement in the IKD and the Lysholm scores from the preoperative level to 2 years, 5 years and 10 years of follow-up was observed in all patients.

Conclusion

10 y of observation of patients after the repair of the meniscus by AMMR proves a good treatment result. The stability of the results between 2, 5 and 10 years after treatment allows to think that repairing a meniscal damage in the non-vascular zone is possible.