The effect of obesity on quality-of-life improvement after total knee arthroplasty.

Obesity has been consistently implicated as a major risk factor in the development and progression of osteoarthritis (OA), and total joint arthroplasty (TJA) has emerged as one of the most efficacious and cost-effective OA treatments. The effectiveness of this treatment manifests itself in both clinical and quality of life (QOL) measures. Given the interrelatedness of obesity and OA, and given the success of TJA in improving QOL, we conducted a study to determine whether obesity would adversely affect QOL improvement in 50 patients who underwent primary total knee arthroplasty for primary knee OA. Our results show that, 6 months after surgery, QOL measures improved more for obese patients than for overweight patients and patients with ideal body weight.