Diagnosis and treatment of meniscal tears
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What conditions can suffer the meniscus?
Most commonly happens in middle-aged people who suffer pain in the inner compartment of the knee can be a meniscal tear. There are always other diseases that must be ruled out, such as cartilage damage, the degree of arthritis you have and, above all, assess either the axis of the limb.
But most often in middle age may be a meniscal tear. In athletes break can be traumatic and a certain type and in greater or middle-aged people break is usually degenerative and affects the posterior horn of the medial meniscus, causing delamination between the top and the bottom that sometimes causes instability and pain in the inside of the knee.
What is the torn meniscus?
Meniscal tears in middle-aged people are degenerative tears and usually affect the posterior horn of the medial meniscus, and is usually a laceration, a division of the meniscus in two parts.
This often causes pain and requires an arthroscopy to fix. Breaks in athletes are often more radial type or more meniscocapsular desinsertion if injuries are severe knee. It is suitable for a correct assessment by resonance and indicate the most appropriate treatment.
What is the diagnosis and treatment on the torn meniscus?
The diagnosis of meniscal tears requires, first, an adequate physical examination by the specialist, to guide the specific pathology and, if necessary and if so deems, MRI is the test that tells us or we indicated indicates the degree of injury that has the meniscus or the type of break you.
Regarding the treatment depends a little bit on the type of patient. In young patients meniscal tears often require arthroscopic surgery that will allow us in if necessary a suture of the meniscus that is going to give points along the desinsertada area, especially if meniscocapsular, if irrigation allowing a proper healing, and conversely in middle-aged people, or people a little older, with fl aps meniscal or degenerative tears, it is best to make a meniscectomy, through two miniportales by arthroscopy, which involves putting a small camera and a pincería allowing resect the damaged area or break area. Obtaining a free meniscal edge, without fragments, allowing stable and correct functionality of the knee.
Injuries, however, in athletes, of anterior cruciate ligament, generally involve a previous knee instability. And that can be seen in the maneuver Lackman, the knee, or in this case the tibia moves abnormally excessive anteriorly. To treat this type of pathology in athletes is indicated to make a ligamentoplasty anterior cruciate ligament, which is usually done with the patient's own hamstring tendons. Or in other cases it can also be done with bone-tendon-bone. In this case, we have a knee resembling a hamstring, with a repair hamstring, and what we do is a tunnel in the tibia and a tunnel in the femur that allows us, through this system threads, pass plasty the anatomical location and subsequently tensaremos and fi jaremos with an interference screw in the tibia, resorbable. That's the way or the practice of this type of ligamentous structures and allow the return to competition in most cases.
