Takatomo Mine, Masaya Kajino, Jun Sato, Yasunari Ikedo, Koichiro Ihara, Hiroyuki Kawamura, Ryutaro Kuriyama, Ryo Date
Background: Total knee arthroplasty can restore knee function and relieve pain, but some gait abnormalities persist for a long time. Assessing only knee and lower limb function is not a sufficient assessment of gait. The goal of this analysis was to assess gait oscillation during gait and stair stepping in patients after total knee arthroplasty (TKA).
Methods: Fifteen patients diagnosed with knee osteoarthritis were treated with unilateral TKA. For prosthesis, we used Bi-surface KU5 with cementation for all. We examined acceleration (anterior, TKA side and contralateral side direction) and gait barycentric factors (single-support phase and ratio of the center of gravity maximum values) between gait and stair stepping. We performed the analysis postoperatively at 40.7 months.
Results: Acceleration to the anterior direction in the sacral region and the dorsal vertebral region increased more at stair-up than at gait or stair-down. There was no significant difference between acceleration to TKA side direction or to contralateral direction at gait and stair-up and down. The single-support phase was close to 1. In comparison with the contralateral side, the load was equal on the TKA side at gait and stair stepping. In addition, it was more obvious during stair stepping than gait. The ratio of the center of gravity maximum values increased more at the sacral region than at the dorsal vertebral region.
Conclusion: Increasing gait oscillation in the sacral region may be modified by the dorsal vertebral region. We considered that gait oscillation was less at the dorsal vertebral region than at the sacral region.
