In the first year after "keyhole" surgery to remove a portion of a damaged meniscus, cartilage tissue that provides structural integrity to the knee, women have poorer rate of recovery than men do in terms of knee pain and knee function, investigators report.
Peter Fabricant, a student at Yale University School of Medicine, Connecticut and colleagues determined predictors of short-term recovery among 126 patients who underwent arthroscopic partial meniscectomy.
Specifically, they looked at demographic variables, such as age, gender and body mass index, as well as clinical variables, extent of meniscal damage and of osteoarthritis, which they compared with short-term postoperative recovery.
Patient age and body mass index had no impact on patient recovery. "There are data showing that people who are overweight and older people don't fare as well in the long term," Fabricant noted in an interview, "but our study showed that in the short-term as people recover from surgery, age and body mass index do not impact recovery at all."
However, female gender did impact recovery. "Women had poorer recovery scores over the recovery period," Fabricant reported. "We don't know why this is," he acknowledged, "although some people think it might have something to do with gender differences in hormones or biomechanics in the knee."