Tehran University Medical Journal

Background: Patellofemoral joint disorders are the most common cause of anterior knee pain in patients who referred to orthopedic clinics. Patellar lateralization cause anterior knee pain due to weakness of vastus medialis oblique muscle or tightness of lateral structures like lateral retinaculum or iliotibial band muscle.

Materials and Methods: For evaluation of this abnormality, plane radiography, CT scan and MRI are useful. In plane radiography only one view in a single joint position can be obtained, because of that it is not a good method to detect abnormal tracking during knee range of motion. The purpose of this study was to evaluate patellar tracking by kinematics MRI during five serial degrees of knee range of motion (40, 30, 20, 10, 0 degrees) in 30 patients with patellar lateralization and 10 normal subjects, aged 18-30 years.

Results and Conclusion: tistical analysis showed that in patients group, patella had the most stability in 40 degree of knee flexion and this stability reduced when knee reached to full extension. At this point, patella moved laterally and the most instability was seen during 20 to 0 degree of knee extension.

Normal 0 false false false EN-GB X-NONE AR-SA MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 Background: One of the major problems in the medicine is personal identification in cases of skeletal remains. The first step is determination of sex. One of the elements that recently paied more attention to it is the patella. Since the measurements are population specific, so we measured the patellas of Iranians to determine their patellas dimensions for sex prediction.
Methods: In this study three metrical characteristics of patella were measured from 67 corps between 20-64 years refered to the autopasy hall of forensic medicine center in Tehran (L.M.O). For statistical analysis of datas, the statistical product and service solution (SPSS version 16) program was used and unvariate and multivariate discriminant function analysis were performed to indicate the efficiency of each variable for sex determination.
Results: The mean of patella height in male was 4.46 cm and in female was 3.87, the mean of patella width in male was 4.60 and in female was 4.03cm and the mean of patella thickness in male was 2.25 and in female was 2.07cm. Among these measurements maximal width with average accurancy of 94% and then maximal height with 91% and finally maximal thickness with 71.6-73.1% respectively were better variables for sex determination. Also in multivariate discriminant analysis, combination of all three measurements with average accuracy of 94% was the best function for sex determination.
Conclusion: The results of this study revealed that we can determine sex with high confidence in situations such as explosions, air crashes and etc, just by using the patella measurement.

Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE AR-SA MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 Background: Anterior knee pain is one of the most common complaints of patients in orthopedic clinics. The first step in the treatment of this problem is conservative treatment which includes administration of anti-inflammatory drugs, exercise and changes in life style. Many patients respond well to these measures in about six months, but a small number of patients may not respond to the conservative treatment therefore, surgical procedures such as Maquet osteotomy or lateral retinacular release may be needed in these cases. The aim of this study was to determine the efficacy of intraosseous drilling and decompression of patella in the treatment of chronic anterior knee pain.
Methods : This study was performed as a case series on ten patients with chronic anterior knee pain attending the Orthopedic Clinic of Imam Khomeini Hospital, in Tehran, Iran in 2009-2010. Eight of the patients were male and the rest were female. The patients met the inclusion criteria and were followed up for at least 12 months after the surgery.
Results : The mean age of the patients was 27.8±4.66 yr and their mean BMI was 22.5±1.71 kg/m². The mean pain severity before the interventions was 8.2±0.78 based on VAS but it decreased to 2.5±1.26 post-surgically. An average reduction of 5.7 scores were noticed in pain severity depicting a significant reduction of pain (P<0.0001).
Conclusion: It may be concluded that intraosseous drilling and decompression of patella is a safe and effective method in the treatment of chronic anterior knee pain not responding to conservative treatment.