[Measuring knee joint kinesthesis for determining proprioceptive deficits in varus gonarthrosis]

Studying knee osteoarthrosis proprioceptive deficits play a growing role. However, the methods for the detection of these deficits using joint position sense measurements have been criticized recently. Therefore, we developed a new method for the measurement of knee-joint kinaesthesia. At 5 different angular velocities of passive knee movement both movement and stop detection were tested. Tests were performed both in 25 patients with osteoarthrosis of the knee and in a control group of 20 age related normal subjects. In addition to the measurements of movement detection and stop-detection thresholds, a specific detection-failure analysis was performed in our study. In addition to a significant improvement of proprioceptive abilities with increasing angular velocities, detection failure analysis brought about significant differences between patients with knee osteoarthrosis and normal subjects yielding a significant proprioceptive deficit in osteoarthrosis of the knee. In contrast, in case of correct movement detection or stop-detection there were no significant differences in the detection-threshold values between normal and ostheoarthrotic knees. In conclusion, both the lack of differences in detection thresholds between the arthrosis and the control-groups and the increased detection failure rates in arthrosis patients gave evidence for these proprioceptive differences being a result of central nervous dysregulation in knee osteoarthrosis.