Chennai docs skip replacement; fix donor’s meniscus on 58-yr-old woman with chronic knee pain

Chennai: A 58-year-old woman with chronic knee pain was treated at a city hospital with a new meniscus — a C-shaped pad of tissue that cushions and stabilises the knee — from another patient, who underwent knee replacement surgery.Doctors at Rathimed Speciality Hospital said the patient's meniscus was severely damaged and could not be repaired. "Without this pad, the thigh bone and shin bone press directly against each other," said orthopaedic surgeon Dr N Ragunanthan. "Since the tissue was not suitable for stitching or reshaping, we decided to replace it rather than move to a full knee replacement," he said.His team performed a meniscus allograft transplantation, in which a healthy meniscus from a donor is fixed into the damaged knee. The donor was a patient undergoing total knee replacement at the same hospital, where the meniscus is normally removed and discarded. Surgeons harvested the tissue in the operating room, shaped it to fit, and secured it in the woman's knee with fixation devices.