Knee Replacement Arthroplasty

While Body Mass Index (BMI) is currently used as a primary tool for risk stratification in patients undergoing Total Knee Athroplasty(TKA), its limitations raise concerns regarding its accuracy and fairness in guiding surgical decision-making. In particular, reliance on BMI alone may lead to the exclusion of patients who could safely benefit from surgery, while failing to identify others at increased risk due to unfavourable local anatomical factors. Pre-tubercular subcutaneous fat thickness (PTFT) offers a simple, reproducible, and anatomically relevant measurement that directly reflects the soft tissue envelope at the operative site. As such may provide a more clinically meaningful assessment of infection risk than BMI. This study aims to evaluate the association between PTFT and postoperative infection following TKA. By doing so, it seeks to determine whether PTFT could serve as an adjunct or alternative risk stratification tool in clinical practice. The findings of this study have the potential to inform a more individualized approach to patient selection and preoperative counselling, improving shared decision-making and resource utilisation.

The goal of this clinical trial is to evaluate the effect, cost-effectiveness, safety and satisfaction with replacing standardized, pre-scheduled face-to-face visits with remote monitoring and video consultations or face-to-face consultations only when needed after knee replacement surgery due to knee osteoarthritis. The primary outcome is the probability of being a OMERACT-OARSI responder at 6 months post-surgery. This is a composite index where participants are classified as a responder or non-responder based on improvement in pain, function and/or disease activity. Health-related quality of life and healthcare costs will be used to determine cost-effectiveness. Patient-reported adverse events and statisfaction will be used to determine safety and satisfaction. Patients will be recruited from Diakonhjemmet Hospital. Patients undergoing knee replacement surgery will be randomly allocated to a control group who are summoned for a face-to-face consultation at Diakonhjemmet Hospital at 2 and 12 months, or a remote monitoring group who will not be scheduled for hospital visits but will answer patient-reported outcomes throught a web-application at 1, 2, 3, 6 and 12 months post-surgery and only be scheduled for hospital visits when needed. An additional study with follow-up after 5 and 10 years will be conducted.

Some patients complain of articular noise (such as clicking, snapping, cracking or popping) after a total knee replacement. Controversy remains about whether there is a correlation between articular noise and worse outcomes following a knee replacement. A study by Nam et al. on 1540 patients revealed an association between noise and residual symptoms 30 days after they received a total knee replacement. Conversely, a study by Kuriyama et al. on 60 patients revealed no correlation between noise and patient satisfaction after 1 year of receiving a total knee replacement. The incidence of noise following a knee replacement has rarely been studied as a primary outcome. Like pain, it could be considered an important patient-reported outcome to assess patient satisfaction. The study aims to compare the prevalence of patient-perceived noise of an ultra-congruent total knee prosthesis (Score 2, Amplitude) versus a posterior-stabilized total knee prosthesis (Anatomic, Amplitude).

The main goal of this study is to see if there is a connection between the social and economic resources available in a patient's neighborhood (measured by the Area Deprivation Index, ADI) and their recovery after knee replacement surgery, as tracked through remote monitoring. A secondary goal is to find out if patients' self-reported pain and function score are linked to their actual physical improvement after surgery as measured by a remote therapeutic monitoring (RTM) device. Additionally, this study examines whether RTM can reduce the number of postoperative clinic visits within the first 90 days after surgery while maintaining patient satisfaction and patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs).