A 10-year follow-up of the Finnish Degenerative Meniscal Lesion Study (FIDELITY) found that arthroscopic partial meniscectomy did not improve symptoms or knee function compared with placebo surgery, and patients assigned to the procedure tended to have worse long-term outcomes.
A long-running Finnish randomized trial has found that arthroscopic partial meniscectomy—a widely used operation that trims a damaged meniscus—did not produce better outcomes than sham surgery for adults with degenerative meniscus tears.
According to a University of Helsinki summary of the research, the Finnish Degenerative Meniscal Lesion Study (FIDELITY) followed participants for 10 years after they were randomly assigned to receive either partial meniscectomy or a placebo procedure. Over that period, patients who underwent partial meniscectomy did not report better symptoms or knee function than those in the sham-surgery group.
The University of Helsinki report also said that, by the decade mark, the surgery group tended to fare worse, reporting more knee symptoms and poorer function, showing greater progression of osteoarthritis, and being more likely to need additional knee surgery.
The research letter reporting the 10-year outcomes was published in the New England Journal of Medicine, and the university described the findings as an example of a possible “medical reversal,” in which a widely used intervention is found to be ineffective—or potentially harmful—in rigorous testing.
