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Review
. 2021 Apr;12(2):139-145.
doi: 10.1177/1947603518816429. Epub 2018 Nov 28.

Articular Cartilage Injuries of the Knee: Patient Health Literacy, Expectations for Management, and Clinical Outcomes

Brian J Cole  1 , Michael L Redondo  1 , Eric J Cotter  2
Affiliations
Review

Articular Cartilage Injuries of the Knee: Patient Health Literacy, Expectations for Management, and Clinical Outcomes

Brian J Cole et al. Cartilage. 2021 Apr.

Abstract

Objective: The purpose of this article is to review the orthopedic literature regarding patient understanding of articular cartilage disease, interpret literature reporting patient expectations for surgical management of articular cartilage injuries of the knee, and review patient-reported outcomes and patient satisfaction with management of these injuries.

Design: A retrospective review of the current literature using the PubMed database (1980-current) was performed on July 15, 2017. The search terms used were "patient understanding knee cartilage," "patient satisfaction knee cartilage," "patient expectation knee cartilage," and "patient reported outcomes knee cartilage." All searches were filtered to human studies and English language only and were reviewed by 2 independent reviewers. Studies not relevant to articular cartilage injury and/or surgical management in the knee were excluded. Additional references were found by backtracing references from obtained articles.

Results: The published study search results for the terms: "patient understanding knee cartilage," "patient satisfaction knee cartilage," "patient expectation knee cartilage," and "patient reported outcomes knee cartilage" displayed a total of 873 studies. Two independent reviewers screen all studies A total of 50 published studies were relevant and included.

Conclusion: The subjective and objective clinical outcomes reported are inconsistently obtained resulting in difficulty drawing comparisons between studies. While the relationship between preoperative patient expectations and patient-reported outcomes and patient satisfaction has yet to be well developed, authors have reported patient and injury specific variables associated with superior and inferior outcomes. In conclusion, more work is needed to correlate patient-reported outcomes and satisfaction for cartilage treatments with preoperative expectations and health literacy.

Keywords: articular cartilage; knee; patient expectations; patient satisfaction; patient-reported outcomes.

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Conflict of interest statement

Declaration of Conflicting Interests: The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
Search algorithm used to identify and screen studies to be included in the review of published literature.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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