What published cohorts achieved

Selected cohort: trial entry excluded instability, malalignment beyond 5°, and BMI over 35. What a screened cohort achieved is not a floor for an unscreened knee.

Note the profile shape: pain and daily function recover close to ceiling; sport does not. That gap at ten years is the honest expectation, not a shortfall of this cohort.

Quality-of-life near 69 at ten years — in a successful, selected cohort — is one of the most useful expectation-setting numbers on this site. Recovery that is real and durable still reads as a knee you know you have.

Gains were achieved by year two and held flat to ten-plus years. 35.4% of this cohort had a tibial tubercle osteotomy — published timelines and consensus tables excluded exactly those patients.

A standard deviation of ±30 means the average conceals enormous spread — individual outcomes ranged from near-ceiling to barely changed. Dispersion is the finding here, not the mean.

Lower than the femoral condyle cohort's 69 — location itself predicted the sport and quality-of-life difference in the 10-year regression. Satisfaction in this cohort was still 90.2%.

Two-year outcomes, held through the five-year extension. Comparing an early post-operative score to a two-year figure tells you almost nothing yet — cohort curves are for orientation, not grading.

The deficit is angle-specific — peak-torque testing missed it. The authors' own conclusion: early supervised rehabilitation is not sufficient to restore long-term knee strength.

Cross-sectional design with no pre-operative baseline; it shows where cohorts sit at five years, not a trajectory.

The cohort's own authors stated that limb symmetry can overestimate knee function: if the uninvolved leg also detrained through months of altered loading, the ratio improves while absolute strength does not.

Absolute strength against a pre-operative baseline is more informative — which is why the Before page tells you to request one.

LSI can overestimate knee function — the ratio flatters when the comparison leg has detrained too, a limitation the literature that popularized the measure states itself.

The extensor asymmetry persisting past ten years, while flexors sit at 100%, is the same angle-specific quadriceps story the strength benchmark tells.

The most honest activity dataset available: 85% were satisfied with recreational return, 66% with sport, and fewer than six in ten moved even one Tegner point. Satisfaction depends on what you are returning to.

Pools procedures, sports, and levels; most component studies never defined what "return" meant. MACI's odds of returning at the same or greater level were favourable (OR 2.15) — in that same undefined sense.

Under 4% of these athletes were female — the number simply has not been measured for women at this level, and that gap is reported here rather than smoothed over.

82% of the component studies omitted return-to-sport criteria entirely.

The widest range of any procedure — because no standardized return criteria exist anywhere in this literature. A range that wide is a statement about the evidence, not about your knee.