The meniscus has important function of shock absortion, load transmission, lubrication and significant contribution to stability of the knee.
And the long term consequence of complete or partial removal has helped to establish a concept of meniscal preservation of appropriate type of meniscal tears by surgical repair.
There are 4 different types of currently available meniscal repair technique, inside to outside, outside to inside, all inside and T-Fix methods.
In order to examine the clinical efficacy of outside to inside technique, we performed a clinical anaslysis of 37 cases who underwent meniscal repair using outside to inside technique from 1988 to January 1995 and could be followed up at least 6
months at Chonnam university Hospital.
There 29 males and 8 females and the 3rd decade was the most commonly involved.
The duration from injury to menascal repair ranged from 4 days to 8 years916 months, average), and injury mechanisms were taffic accident in 12 cases, sports injury in 12 and fall from height in 4 and etc.
Symptoms and physical examination showed a pain most commonly in 37 cases, joint line tenderness in 29, positive McMurray test in 25
All the 37 cases had peripheral longitudinal tear of which there were 10 cases of bucket handle tear.
There were 22 cases of medial meniscal tear and 15 cases of lateral meniscus tear and 6 cases were combined with ACL rupture.
Clinical result, according to Tapper and Hoover criteria, showed excellent in 10 cases, good in 23, fair in 4, and poor in 0.1 case of reflex sympathetic dystrophy, 2 cases of mild terminal flexion limitation, and 1 cases of saphenous nerve
injury were noted.
In conclusion, outside to inside to inside technique for meniscal repair considered one of the satisfactory methods for the treatment of peripheral longitudinal tear of meniscus.
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