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 / E9

Matrix-assisted autologous chondrocyte transplantation is effective at mid/long-term for knee lesions. 2024

Evidence strength 4 of 5
Systematic review + meta-analysis · n = 19 studies / 1,031 pts · to 10 yr follow-upMACI ITSELFFull text →
What it can tell you

That the gains from matrix-assisted chondrocyte transplantation hold up: pooled across 19 studies and 1,031 patients, the IKDC improvement at ten years (−35.94) is at least as large as at two (−34.00), with Tegner and quality-of-life gains sustained alongside it. This is the best answer the field has to "does it last".

What it cannot

What your risk of failure is. The pooled range is 0–42%, which sounds like a finding and is actually a measurement problem — the constituent studies do not agree on what failure means (graft failure on MRI? revision? conversion to a replacement? non-response on scores?). A reader who has met "42% failure" somewhere deserves to know it came from this disagreement. Nothing beyond five years for the collagen-scaffold subgroup, because no such study reported it.

Everything on this site that leans on E9 — 0 claims

Nothing cites this source yet — it is part of the vetted evidence base for content still being written.

Read it like a sceptic
Heterogeneity above 75% in some analyses — the studies are pooled but not really alike.
Possible patient overlap between publications, and the hyaluronic-acid subgroup is geographically concentrated. The same knees may be counted twice.
Patella 13–17% and trochlea 4–9% of lesions: a patellofemoral reader is a small minority of this dataset.
Population
MACT, knee
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.