An Overview of Knee Pain

Hello everyone. My name is Michael Miranda. I’m a Florida Orthopaedic adult reconstruction surgeon. Today we’re going to be talking about Mako robotic total knee arthroplasty. Today we’re going to be talking about generally knee pain, arthritis, total knee replacements, and robotic total knee replacements. We’re going to be understanding what exactly is knee pain, what causes it knee pain, treatment options, knee replacement, traditional knee replacement, and Mako robotic knee replacement.

So, in general joints, our knees, hips are involved in everything we do. Okay. Standing, walking, bending, turning, all activities of daily living. So when you have an arthritic joint, just in general, dailies of activity daily activity can exacerbate the symptoms that you’re having in your knee or your hip, causing decreased functional ability, limited workability, limited walking ability and there and similar things. The normal knee here is on the slide and this is the femur, bone, tibia, and fibula. Normal healthy cartilage has this kind of white appearance as opposed to an arthritic knee where you see that this area in the red is where the cartilage is worn. Cartilage is a cushion in the knee and when it’s gone, patients have a lot of pain in their knee because when they walk, the bone hits the bone, thus causing inflammation and pain and difficulty doing those normal activities.

So kind of the progression of this early knee pain stages, some mild arthritis meniscal tear. A lot of people, it’s a very common surgery. They have knee arthroscopy, so to say clean-out procedure or are trimming of the meniscus. That’s kind of in earlier stages. Then as the disease progresses, you can see that there becomes more involvement of the cartilage and the red, the wearing out of the cartridge, so it can be isolated to one compartment, the medial compartment, or it can be isolated to the lateral or patellofemoral joint as depicted by these three pictures. If there’s two compartments involved, we called by compartmental disease. So in this case, the medial and the patellofemoral. That is more of an advanced, such a progression of disease. And then late stage arthritis is when the entire knee joint isn’t evolved with the arthritic process. So as far as surgical treatment options, you begin early stages with a partial or a with a knee arthroscopy, partial replacement. And then as it becomes more involved, patients that have the more involved disease are amenable to a full knee replacement.