Knee injuries are among the most common clinical conditions treated everyday by orthopaedic clinicians and sport medicine doctors. A single joint can be affected by a large variety of pathology, ranging from ligament lesions to cartilage defects and many others. As a consequence, this is a field of intense basic and clinical research, and there is a growing interest in better understanding how to evaluate knee condition at the moment of injury and after conservative or surgical treatments. Therefore it has been observed a great interest over time in developing clinical scores in order to make correlations with objective findings and give the clinician a suitable instrument for the assessment of the therapy outcome. In the past years it has been observed a progressive trend from clinician-based outcome tools to patient-reported outcome measures. The necessity of assessing the knee condition in the most effective way possible is one of the peculiar aspects justifying this growing interest; moreover, it must be also considered the drastic increase in patient consciousness about health and expected outcome after therapies and lastly, the interest by health insurers to better evaluate the expense concerning knee injuries and their recovery1. These outcome evaluation instruments are patient-oriented2, strenghtening this way the importance of patient perception, which must be considered prevalent over the mere surgical result. Some studies have proved that patient satisfaction is strictly linked to outcome scores concerning subjective symptoms and function3. On the opposite side, some clinicians are not sure about the validity of this patient-reported tests, arguing that their subjective nature is a weak point, especially if compared to the more objective clinician-based findings4,5; even in this case, recent studies have proved that these clinical scores are often superior than the aforementioned clinical “objective” measures6-10. In this chapter we will discuss in detail the scores employed in clinical studies focusing on knee treatments, in order to help the orthopedic surgeon in the choice of the most accurate evaluation tool according to the specific procedure performed.
Knee scoring System
KON;
2014-01-01
Abstract
Knee injuries are among the most common clinical conditions treated everyday by orthopaedic clinicians and sport medicine doctors. A single joint can be affected by a large variety of pathology, ranging from ligament lesions to cartilage defects and many others. As a consequence, this is a field of intense basic and clinical research, and there is a growing interest in better understanding how to evaluate knee condition at the moment of injury and after conservative or surgical treatments. Therefore it has been observed a great interest over time in developing clinical scores in order to make correlations with objective findings and give the clinician a suitable instrument for the assessment of the therapy outcome. In the past years it has been observed a progressive trend from clinician-based outcome tools to patient-reported outcome measures. The necessity of assessing the knee condition in the most effective way possible is one of the peculiar aspects justifying this growing interest; moreover, it must be also considered the drastic increase in patient consciousness about health and expected outcome after therapies and lastly, the interest by health insurers to better evaluate the expense concerning knee injuries and their recovery1. These outcome evaluation instruments are patient-oriented2, strenghtening this way the importance of patient perception, which must be considered prevalent over the mere surgical result. Some studies have proved that patient satisfaction is strictly linked to outcome scores concerning subjective symptoms and function3. On the opposite side, some clinicians are not sure about the validity of this patient-reported tests, arguing that their subjective nature is a weak point, especially if compared to the more objective clinician-based findings4,5; even in this case, recent studies have proved that these clinical scores are often superior than the aforementioned clinical “objective” measures6-10. In this chapter we will discuss in detail the scores employed in clinical studies focusing on knee treatments, in order to help the orthopedic surgeon in the choice of the most accurate evaluation tool according to the specific procedure performed.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
