Clinical Outcomes of Meniscal Allograft Transplantation With or Without Other Procedures: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis

Lee BS, Kim HJ, Lee CR, Bin SI, Lee DH, Kim NJ, Kim CW · The American Journal of Sports Medicine

Patient-reported outcomes did not separate: Lysholm (95% CI -5.92 to 1.55; P = 0.25), Tegner (95% CI -0.54 to 0.22; P = 0.41), IKDC (95% CI -5.67 to 3.37; P = 0.62) and visual analogue scale (95% CI -0.15 to 0.94; P = 0.16). Survivorship and failure findings conflicted — four studies found added procedures made no difference, three named ligament surgery, realignment osteotomy and osteochondral autograft transfer as failure risks, and one found a higher survival rate for medial transplantation with a high tibial osteotomy than for medial transplantation alone.

Population

Twenty-four studies separately reporting outcomes of isolated meniscal allograft transplantation and transplantation combined with another procedure

Intervention

Meniscal allograft transplantation combined with ligament surgery, realignment osteotomy or a cartilage procedure

Comparator

Isolated meniscal allograft transplantation

Limitations

Pools case series, and the knees that get a combined procedure are the knees with more wrong with them, so equivalent scores are not evidence that the added surgery is neutral. The failure findings contradict each other and the review says so. Full text was not retrievable.