Knorpelschaden und Gonarthrose

Knee pain has a high prevalence (about 30%) in the community. There is a positive correlation between increasing age and the frequency of cartilage lesions as wells as manifest gonarthritis. In patients over 40 years is an incidence of gonarthritis of 1–2% per year. There are only little information’s about really and significantly risk factors for development of gonarthritis. Chondral lesions generally are classified into four degrees: grad I means superficial softening and fissuring, grad II means lesions up to the half of the thickness of the cartilage layer, grade III means lesions up to the subchondral bone and finally grad IV means the complete ulcer with widely open laying subchondral bone. The radiography is the golden standard for classifying the grad of gonarthritis. The magnetic resonance tomography against is the only minimal-invasive evaluation for exactly diagnosis of cartilage lesions. Still this measure is mostly sufficient in evaluation of high grade cartilage lesions but it has its limitations in the diagnosis of low grade chondral damages. Arthroscopy means to be the mostly objective method for evaluation of chondral lesions. But also arthroscopy has its own limitations. The judgements of arthroscopic evaluation depend on the surgeon experiences and it is finally also a subjective method. The disease cartilage lesion respectively gonarthritis is characterized by a large number of individual subjective complaints and objective parameters. The mostly gonarthritis scores often ideally reflect the severe of the disease.