Urgent warning signs — calf pain or swelling, fever, the knee locking — are one tap away, always.Something feel wrong?Red flags →
AFTER MACI
Evidence / Sources / E17

Ebert JR et al. Factors predictive of outcome 5 years after MACI in the tibiofemoral joint. AJSM 2013

Evidence strength 3 of 5
Prospective cohort + regression · n = 104 · 5 yr follow-upMACI ITSELFFull text →
What it can tell you

Which pre-operative facts predicted where a tibiofemoral MACI patient stood at five years: mental and physical component scores and symptom duration all contributed to KOOS Sport/Rec, and graft size joined them in predicting the MRI score. Most usefully for this site, an 8-week return to full weight-bearing rather than 12 was the only variable significantly associated with better satisfaction — evidence that a faster protocol is not merely tolerated but preferred.

What it cannot

Whether any of these are causes. This is regression over an observed cohort: symptom duration may be a marker for a worse joint rather than the mechanism of a worse result, and nothing here was randomized except, in the parent trial, the weight-bearing schedule. Nothing about patellofemoral lesions — the cohort is tibiofemoral.

Everything on this site that leans on E17 — 6 claims
Stage I · Before“Pre-operative physical and mental health predicted 5-year outcomes, and pre-operative physical health was still in the 10-year regression. Condition before surgery is one of only t…”Stage I · Before“Waiting has a measurable cost: longer symptom duration before surgery predicted worse 5-year sport scores and MRI results, and the health-technology assessment found under three ye…”Stage I · Before [patellofemoral]“Drift. Months of deliberation are months of symptom duration, and duration predicted worse outcomes. Deciding slowly is legitimate; deciding slowly while detraining is the avoidabl…”Stage I · Before [tibiofemoral]“Femoral condyle cohorts are the best-studied reference in this field: randomized to their weight-bearing speed, followed to ten years, pain scores near ceiling. Worth knowing befor…”Stage I · Before [tibiofemoral]“Drift. Months of deliberation are months of symptom duration, and duration predicted worse outcomes. Deciding slowly is legitimate; deciding slowly while detraining is the avoidabl…”Stage I · Before · Questions“Between the biopsy and the implantation, what do you want me doing — and what's the actual booking interval?”
Read it like a sceptic
104 patients against a handful of candidate predictors: enough to find associations, not enough to be confident in their sizes.
"Satisfaction" at 5 years is a soft endpoint, and the patients knew which protocol they had.
Population
MACI, tibiofemoral
Selection policy
Sources enter the registry through docs/research — the evidence table records design, population, and size for every entry, and pages cannot cite anything outside it.