How does the knee age after ACL-surgery? The image is CC by Thomas Mues.

Nordenvall et al. [1] recently report in PLOS ONE an interesting study on cruciate ligament (CL) injuries where they could not find any protective effect on knee osteoarthritis (OA) from reconstructive surgery. It is a nation-wide study based on > 60,000 patients where they used the National Swedish Patient Register in order to find ICD-codes and surgical procedures code to identify patients with CL injury and those with a subsequent procedure. While the early results showed slightly less OA, there was an increased risk of 1.4 (95% confidence interval, 1.2 to 1.7) after > 10 years for those with surgery. Continue reading →

The image is CC by Mattieu Guionnet.

I love the study from McDowell et al. where they tested different methods for keeping casts dry. It is simple but takes up a both common and important issue that we doctors frequently forget about. They compare six different methods and it seems that double plastic bags secured with duct tape provide the best protection for the money. Continue reading →