Effect of Polyethylene Crosslinking and Bearing Design on Wear of Unicompartmental Arthroplasty

Wear and polyethylene damage continue to be important factors affecting outcomes of unicompartmental knee arthroplasty. We compared two design rationales for unicompartmental arthroplasty: fully congruent mobile bearings; or moderately conforming fixed bearings using experimental and computational wear simulation. Experimental wear rates were 3.89 (±0.12) mg/million cycles for the highly crosslinked Triathlon PKR fixed bearing compared to 18.35 (±0.19) mg/million cycles for the low crosslinked Oxford mobile bearing. Finite element analysis was used to calculate the effect of crosslinking and backside wear. Increase in polyethylene crosslinking reduced wear by 68% while backside wear comprised 46% of the total wear in the mobile bearing. Increasing conformity may not be the sole predictor of wear performance and highly crosslinked fixed-bearing polyethylene insert can also provide high wear performance.