Reduced joint awareness after total knee arthroplasty with a cruciate retaining design

A range of different total knee arthroplasty (TKA) designs have been developed, each specifically designed to relieve pain and restore knee function with the greatest possible patient satisfaction. The purpose of this study was to compare a posterior stabilized design and a cruciate-retaining design. We hypothesized that a cruciate-retaining design would have a higher Forgotten Joint Score (FJS) than a posterior stabilized design. Ninety-two patients were used in our analysis (46 patients in each group) involving TKA (Attune, Depuy-Synthes) between January 2014 and March 2015. We excluded patients with valgus alignment, post-traumatic arthritis, rheumatoid arthritis and major previous surgery on the knee. We compared the FJS, the Oxford Knee Score (OKS) and their ceiling effects. FJS was significantly higher in the fixed-bearing cruciate-retaining group (P=0.043). The mean (-SD) FJS for the cruciate-retaining group was 78,4-25.1 compared to 67.6-27.6 for the posterior stabilized group. No significant difference in OKS was detected. The total ceiling effect for FJS and OKS was 32.2% and 45.5%, respectively. In conclusion, patients with cruciate-retaining TKA showed a better FJS in comparison to posterior stabilized TKA. FJS has a higher discriminatory power compared to OKS.