Turns out knee surgery can hold even in heavier patients

[Image by Henry Vandyke Carter – Henry Gray (1918) Anatomy of the Human Body, Public Domain]

It turns out that an increased body mass index is actually a poor predictor of whether a common type of knee surgery, meniscal repair, will fail, according to new research out of Ohio State University.

The results matter because experts assumed that BMI mattered when it came to the roughly 15% of meniscal repairs that fail, said Dr. David Flanigan, an orthopedic surgeon at Ohio State Wexner Medical Center who was the lead author of the study.

“This tells us that surgeons should not consider weight as a factor when deciding if a patient is a good candidate for meniscal repair surgery,” Flanigan said in a news release. “If a meniscus is repairable and surgery is appropriate for that patient, you can do the surgery and they would have the same success as someone who is not as heavy.”

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