TKR is major surgery and rightly so most of the patients are very anxious and very fearful of major surgery. When it is not a life-threatening disease, so of course when you go to doctors many of them tell you that it is a very successful surgery but there is always an apprehension on the patient that is the opinion advise biased. So to answer that you should look at something called arthroplasty registries.
Arthroplasty registries are the repository of data collected over a long period of time for example a Swedish knee arthroplasty registry Sweden from 1975 onwards that minds you that is more than 40 years ago. So the orthopedic surgeon there somehow felt that they need to have practice evidence-based medicine and they need to collect the data of all the knee replacement surgeries done in the entire country.
The entire data needs to be collected and analyzed so that the doctors understand whether it is really working, what are the success rates, what are the problems and how are we going to get better results and when do we get better results when we practice which method of surgery and which implants. Because there are several kinds of implants that are produced and sold, which implants are doing better they felt that individual doctors’ experience and opinion is not that important more important is the collective data and actual evidence of what is happening in the real world.
So they started collecting the entire data of the entire country every knee replacement done in the country in every hospital by every doctor by mandatory is submitted so this data is analyzed and published year after year. Today we have data over more than 40 years of the average results of the entire country the average results of totaling anthropology in the entire country.
According to the Swedish arthroplasty registry, the surgery is overwhelmingly successful in the initial period more than 99 percent of sciences are successful even after 20 years of surgery more than 93 94 percent of them are still surviving so that is the projected data and that is the data that is happening.
We have very very respectable and valuable databases from Australian arthroplasty registry national giant registry of England and wales and many other registries, now a vision of the plastic registry, all these give the average data of a large volume of surgeries. And it is an independent analysis done by independent people the data is collected independently also the follow-up is done over many years or 20 years and presented. According to all this knee replacement is a highly successful surgery and it will last and at least more than 90 of the people, it will last more than 20 years.
Going by these results it is considered probably the most successful medical intervention ever because there is no other surgery now the medication will give you that kind of result which lasts that long. By many orthopedic surgeons, it is considered as surgery or procedure of the century and the most successful surgery ever invented.
