knee surgery

Since being diagnosed with RA I've torn my meniscus in both knees several times over with no apparent injury to blame. It seems to be common. And yes, I've been told I could likely expect to need joint replacement. Was told that about 25 or so years ago. I'm in my mid 70's. Still haven't needed one.

I know it's not uncommon within the community to have knee replacement surgery, so I hope some community members can comment here and share with you about their experiences. I'm also linking a thread from last month where one of our community members asked about knee surgery. You might be interested in some of the comments there. https://rheumatoidarthritis.net/stories/knee-replacement Wishing you a gentle day. -- Warmly, Christine (Team Member)

Hi . As others have mentioned, joint replacement surgeries are not uncommon with RA and have helped a great many. My wife, Kelly Mack (a contributor here), was diagnosed at age 2, over 40 years ago (before modern treatments), and had both knees and hips replaced as a teenager. She recounts in this article how her replacements were done before the current technology, but "have resulted in an improvement in my quality of life by reducing my pain and discomfort:" https://rheumatoidarthritis.net/living/call-me-the-bionic-woman. She also notes that "With more advanced joints and the ability to better treat RA damage (or prevent it), I think patients are in a better place than ever to benefit from joint replacements to maintain (or possibly improve) their quality of life." Of course, these decisions are very individualistic. Hopefully, your knee will recover fine and allow much time before any such decision becomes necessary. Wishing you the best. Richard (RheumatoidArthritis.net Team)

My RA first started in my knees and then went to my hands, and now in some other joints as well. They had a really hard time diagnosing me as my bloodwork was all negative-- but I had a severe joint effusion in my knee that needed treatment.


I ended up having a synovectomy (they removed the whole joint lining) and they did a ton of testing/biopsies on it and basically determined I have RA-- now 5 years later and my labs are slowly starting to turn positive as well.


Anyways, we did the surgery right in time, no permanent damage the dr said it was way worse than he was expecting based on my MRI. When I flare I do get joint effusions but usually adding in some meds for a bit have controlled it. I was told tho I will almost surely need a knee replacement eventually. I was 27 for that surgery and 32 now-- but I'd be shocked if I made it to my 50s without getting a knee replacement.


Anyways the recovery from the knee surgery was alot longer than they anticipated but this was before I was on any of my RA meds. It was several weeks of PT 3x/day and slowly backed off to 1x/week around 9 months after I was cleared from PT-- didn't feel normal tho with range of motion and being able to do things until 1 year after. I did start on meds tho, so not sure if that was finally recovering from surgery or just the meds finally kicking in.