Knee Scoring Systems

The possibility of measuring clinical outcome after a knee procedure, either conservative or surgical, is of fundamental importance for the Orthopaedic practitioner. Since the goal of every Orthopaedic treatment is to re-establish functional status, it is important to assess clinical outcome not only by objective findings but also by taking into account the patient's point of view and his own evaluation of the functional trend of the treated joint. To this purpose several different evaluation tools have been developed over years: some of them are more general whereas others are more disease-linked. In this chapter we analyze the features of the most used knee scoring systems in clinical practice, trying to focus on how to correctly use them according to the needs of the surgeon and the specific pathology considered. In particular we focus on the following scoring systems: AKSS, Cincinnati, HSS, IKDC-subjective, KOOS, Kujala, Lysholm, OKS, SF-36, WOMAC and Tegner. A proper knowledge of these tools could be useful both for clinical and scientific purpose: in fact these instruments can be applied by surgeons to perform a better follow-up evaluation of their patients but also to compare results among clinical trials.