Publications by authors named "Lukas Eckhard"

Introduction: To consider the inherent respondent burden of PROMs, the HOOS-12 as a shortform of the well-established HOOS questionnaire has been published. While the HOOS-12 has been validated in an initial study, further evaluation in other, non-English speaking cohorts is necessary. We therefore aimed to evaluate responsiveness, convergent construct validity, internal consistency, and floor and ceiling effects of the HOOS-12 in a cross-sectoral german cohort.

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Purpose: Despite numerous studies demonstrating promising short-term outcomes of Total Knee Arthroplasty (TKA) with Customized Individually Made (CIM) implants, there is a significant lack of data on their mid-term effectiveness. Given the increasing number of TKAs performed annually, the rising demand for CIM implants, and the associated burden of revision surgeries, understanding the mid-term performance of CIM implants is crucial. Therefore, this study aims to report on the mid-term (minimum 5 years) outcomes of TKA using a CIM implant.

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Article Synopsis
  • Bucket-handle meniscal tears are primarily treated with arthroscopic surgery, but the timing of the surgery has unclear effects on recovery outcomes.
  • A study involving 60 patients showed that an average wait of 14.4 days for surgery did not significantly affect reoperation rates, pain levels, or return to sports.
  • The findings suggest that surgical timing is not a predictor of post-surgery success, indicating that careful planning and expertise matter more than urgency in treatment.
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  • Proximal femoral fractures are the most common type of fracture in Germany, making up over 20% of all fractures, and must be surgically treated within 24 hours according to a 2019 ruling.
  • A study analyzed data from a trauma center between 2016 and 2022, revealing that the number of these surgeries doubled, with a significant 60% increase noted from 2020 to 2022, suggesting a broader area is being served.
  • The increase in workload at the trauma center may be due to fewer hospitals offering emergency treatment, compounded by resource shortages and pandemic-related challenges, all while the center’s infrastructure remained unchanged.
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Purpose: Personality traits, such as dispositional optimism and pessimism, have impact on a variety of health-related problems. Influence on outcome in total knee arthroplasty (TKA) could only be shown for other personality trait concepts, but not for dispositional optimism/pessimism. This study aims to examine the association of dispositional optimism/pessimism with pre-operative joint function and post-operative outcome in TKA.

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Background: The efficacy and safety of enhanced recovery after surgery (ERAS) protocols for patients undergoing total knee arthroplasty (TKA) have been generally proven. Previous studies investigating patients undergoing simultaneous bilateral TKA (SBTKA) focused on complications, mortality, and pain and did not examine patients' functional limitations. Therefore, the aim of this study was to investigate to what extent patients undergoing SBTKA are able to meet functional discharge criteria originally designed for their counterparts undergoing unilateral TKA (UTKA) in an ERAS setting.

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  • * The study assessed the impact of mild replication stress on genomic instability in fibroblasts from long-term survivors of pediatric cancers, comparing those with SPNs, first primary neoplasms (FPNs), and healthy controls.
  • * Results indicated that survival fibroblasts from patients with SPNs showed greater sensitivity to replication stress, suggesting a potential mechanism for increased genomic instability and SPN development following DNA-damaging treatments.
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Purpose: Post-operative outcome after total knee arthroplasty (TKA) in the treatment of end-stage osteoarthritis correlates strongly with pre-operative impairment-driven patient treatment goals. However, a clinical tool for measuring patient treatment goals in correlation to impairments is still missing, which impedes patient-oriented indication in TKA.

Methods: Patients scheduled for TKA were recruited in four German hospitals.

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Background: In the context of optimized treatment processes for knee and hip replacements, lengths of stay are given for Germany that clearly exceed the internationally published ones. In this context, the present analysis of data from the PROMISE study deals with the relationship between discharge readiness and discharge.

Methods: In the PROMISE study, a jointly developed, optimized standard of care was established in three hospitals of different levels of care and realized for a typical, largely unselected cohort of patients.

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Neutral coronal leg alignment is known to be important for postoperative outcome in total knee arthroplasty (TKA). Customized individually made implants (CIM) instrumented with patient-specific cutting guides are an innovation aiming to increase the precision and reliability of implant positioning and reconstruction of leg alignment. We aimed to compare reconstruction of the hip-knee-ankle angle (HKA) of the novel CIM system iTotal™ CR G2 (ConforMIS Inc.

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Background: The use of computer navigation has been shown to produce more accurate cup positioning when compared with non-navigated total hip arthroplasty (THA), but so far there is only limited evidence to show its effect on clinical outcomes. The present study analyzed data from the Australian Orthopaedic Association National Joint Replacement Registry to assess the impact of computer navigation on the rates of all-cause revision and revision for dislocation following THA.

Methods: Data for all non-navigated and navigated primary THAs performed for osteoarthritis in Australia from January 1, 2009, to December 31, 2019, were examined to assess the rate of revision.

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Purpose: The minimal important change (minimal amount of change vs. baseline that a patient recognizes as a clinical change) and minimum clinically important difference (smallest difference between two measurements that are deemed important by patients) are important values to evaluate the clinical relevance of changes over time and differences between groups. This study aims to establish these values for the KOOS-12 at 1 year postoperatively.

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Patients undergoing knee joint replacement (KJR) are at high risk of postoperative venous thromboembolism (VTE), but data on the time trends of VTE rate in this population are sparse. In this analysis of the German nationwide inpatient sample, we included all hospitalizations for elective primary KJR in Germany 2005-2016. Overall, 1,804,496 hospitalized patients with elective primary KJR (65.

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Background: Patient reported outcome measurements (PROMs) that exhibit a substantial ceiling effect show clustering of participant's scores towards the upper limit of a scale and consequently have low discriminatory power among high end scores. This study aimed to compare ceiling effects at 1 and 2 years postoperatively across commonly usedPROMs for TKA.

Hypothesis: We hypothesized, that the analyzed PROMs differ substantially in regards to their ceiling effect.

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Background and purpose - Knee and hip replacement are common and increasing procedures, and an optimized care process that could be implemented in different settings would be useful. The PROMISE trial investigates whether a new care process works equally in different German settings and how the results compare with current non-standardized care.Patients and methods - This multi-center prospective mixed-method study includes 2,000 German patients receiving arthritis-related hip or knee endoprostheses.

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  • The study investigates how human fibroblasts respond to ionizing radiation by analyzing gene expression changes at two time points post-exposure (2 hours and 4 hours) after being irradiated with different doses of X-rays (2Gy and 0.05Gy).
  • It uses RNA sequencing to identify differentially expressed genes and perform pathway analyses to understand the biological effects and mechanisms behind radiation exposure.
  • Findings show that more genes were differentially expressed at the 4-hour mark, especially with high-dose radiation, affecting pathways related to cancer signaling and metabolism, while low-dose exposure didn’t produce significant changes at either time point.
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The purpose of the present study was to investigate whether former childhood cancer patients who developed a subsequent secondary primary neoplasm (SPN) are characterized by elevated spontaneous chromosomal instability or cellular and chromosomal radiation sensitivity as surrogate markers of compromised DNA repair compared to childhood cancer patients with a first primary neoplasm (FPN) only or tumor-free controls. Primary skin fibroblasts were obtained in a nested case-control study including 23 patients with a pediatric FPN, 22 matched patients with a pediatric FPN and an SPN, and 22 matched tumor-free donors. Clonogenic cell survival and cytogenetic aberrations in Giemsa-stained first metaphases were assessed after X-irradiation in G1 or on prematurely condensed chromosomes of cells irradiated and analyzed in G2.

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Purpose: To investigate the validity, responsiveness and ceiling effect of the recently introduced KOOS-12 and compare its performance to the KOOS, OKS, WOMAC and UCLA activity scales.

Methods: Patients from an independent multicentre study examining a medially stabilized knee system prospectively completed the KOOS, OKS, WOMAC and UCLA preoperatively and at 1 year postoperatively. KOOS-12 scores were calculated from the full length KOOS data.

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Purpose: Dexamethasone and gabapentin are used in multimodal pain management protocols to reduce postoperative pain after total knee arthroplasty. For both analgesic adjuvants, the optimal dose regimen to reduce opioid usage is still unclear.

Methods: The opioid consumption of patients undergoing primary TKA before and after a change of the analgesic adjuvant medication in our protocol (old protocol: 4 mg of dexamethasone daily for 2 days, 600 mg gabapentin daily for 1 week; new protocol: 10 mg dexamethasone daily for 2 days, 300 mg gabapentin every 8 h for 1 week) were retrospectively compared.

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Unlabelled: The treatment of osteosarcoma, especially wide resection, is challenging. An additional local drug therapy after resection using anti-neoplastic bone cement (Polymethylmethacrylate (PMMA)) could help improve the outcome of therapy. In this study, we evaluated the effects of PMMA loaded with valproic acid (VPA) and suberoylanilide hydroxamic acid (SAHA) on the cell activity of a SaOs-2 cell culture, as well as the elution rate of the drugs out of the bone cement.

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Purpose: The efficacy of Heller myotomy in patients >40 years-a significant predictor suggesting a favorable response to pneumatic dilation-has been questioned. The aim of our study was to evaluate the results obtained in patients aged <40 and >40 years undergoing minimally invasive surgery (MIS) for achalasia.

Methods: In January 2008, we established the MIS technique for achalasia in our clinic.

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