Casey Tingle , 2025-05-10 14:00:00
Key takeaways:
- Failure rates after transosseous arthroscopic root repair were similar among both younger and older patients.
- More research with larger patient cohorts is needed to identify predictors of failure.
WASHINGTON — Results presented at the Arthroscopy Association of North America Annual Meeting showed patient age at the time of transosseous arthroscopic root repair for medial meniscus root tear was not a predictor of failure.
“There was no difference in failure rates or patient-reported outcomes between young and old patients, which indicates that age is not an important factor in repairing these [tears],” Jelle P. van der List, MD, PhD, an orthopedic fellow in sports medicine at The Ohio State University College of Medicine, told Healio. “It is probably other factors that will dictate whether it is going to be a success or not to repair posterior medial meniscus tears.”
van der List and colleagues retrospectively reviewed data of patients older than 18 years with isolated medial meniscus root tears who underwent transosseous arthroscopic root repair between 2012 and 2019.
“Failure was defined in this study as a retear or conversion to arthroplasty,” van der List said in his presentation at the meeting.
van der List said patients were categorized into groups based on whether they were aged younger than 50 years, 50 to 60 years, or older than 60 years.
“When we look at the group under and over 50 years of age, we see overall failure rates that are similar between the groups — 18%,” he said. “No difference in terms of conversion to arthroplasty or traumatic failures.”
Younger patients had more traumatic acute failures at an early timepoint, while older patients were more likely to have “a slow continuation of progression of OA without some traumatic injury,” according to van der List. He added there were similar rates of contralateral knee injury and similar patient-reported outcomes.
“If we set the threshold at 60 years of age, we basically see the same thing, although the group over 60 years is small — only 12 patients,” van der List said.
He said patients older than 60 years had similar failure rates and patient-reported outcomes and no differences in time to failure or contralateral knee surgery compared with patients younger than 60 years.
“Age itself is not an important predictor [of failure],” van der List told Healio. “We need to move toward multicenter studies where they have large cohorts, where we can do proper multivariate analysis [and] where we can look at independent predictors of success, because we are looking at small cohorts at every institution and finding not good studies with correction for confounders. I think that is where we are heading.”
For more information:
Jelle P. van der List, MD, can be reached at jpjvanderlistmd@gmail.com.
Sources/Disclosures
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van der List JP, et al. The role of age on the outcomes of arthroscopic medial meniscus posterior root repair. Presented at: Arthroscopy Association of North America Annual Meeting; May 8-10, 2025; Washington D.C.
Disclosures:
van der List reports no relevant financial disclosures.
