Obesity and quality of life after primary total knee replacement

In a prospective trial of 101 consecutive patients undergoing primary total knee arthroplasty for osteoarthritis, we compared the quality of life (QoL) before and 1 year after operation in non-obese and obese groups of graded severity. Based upon a modified BOA knee score, the Rosser Index Matrix was used to generate QoL scores. Median pre-operative QoL scores for obese patients were significantly lower than for non-obese. One year after surgery, both obese and non-obese patients showed improvement in QoL scores. However, obese patients demonstrated a significantly greater improvement (P<0.01) than the non-obese. We conclude that obesity alone should not be used as a reason to deny patients the benefit of primary total knee arthroplasty.