Unicompartmental knee arthroplasty and revision total knee arthroplasty have a lower risk of venous thromboembolism disease at 30 days than primary total knee arthroplasty.

Background: While multiple studies have demonstrated a lower venous thromboembolism disease (VTED) risk for unicompartmental knee arthroplasty (UKA) compared to primary total knee arthroplasty (TKA), recent reports have shown that revision TKA also had a lower VTED risk compared to primary TKA, an unexpected finding because of its theoretical increased risk. Given the paucity of up-to-date comparative studies, our goal was to perform a high-powered VTED risk comparison study of UKA and revision TKA to primary TKA using recent data.

Methods: The National Surgical Quality Improvement Program (NSQIP) database was queried between 2011 and 2018, and we identified 213,234 patients for inclusion: 191,810 primary TKA, 9294 UKA, and 12,130 revision TKA. Demographics, medical comorbidities, and possible VTE risk factors were collected. Thirty-day outcomes, including deep vein thrombosis (DVT), pulmonary embolism (PE), and all-cause VTED were compared between knee arthroplasty types.

Results: On multivariate analysis, UKA was significantly associated with lower rates of DVT [OR 0.44 (0.31-0.61); P < 0.001], PE [OR 0.42 (0.28-0.65); P < 0.001], and all-cause VTED [OR 0.42 (0.32-0.55); P < 0.001] when compared to primary TKA. Revision TKA was significantly associated with lower rates of PE [OR 0.62 (0.47-0.83); P = 0.002], and all-cause VTED [OR 0.82 (0.70-0.98); P = 0.029] when compared to primary TKA.

Conclusions: Utilizing recent data from a nationwide patient cohort and controlling for confounding variables, our results showed that both revision TKA and UKA had a lower risk of VTED compared to primary TKA, corroborating the results of recent investigations. Additional prospective investigations are needed to explain this unexpected result.