Partial Knee Joint Denervation for Knee Pain: A Review

Knee pain is transmitted via peripheral nerves. Once a medical or orthopedic surgical musculoskeletal approach has failed to relieve this chronic problem, then a partial kneedenervation should be considered. In 1994 the medial and lateral retinacular nerveswere described, and these are the main source for knee joint pain. A nerve block ofeach of these nerves followed by observation of increased stair climbing and kneelingwith a decrease in the visual analog scale of > 5 predicts a 90% success rate for partial knee denervation. This approach, pioneered by Dellon, is applicable to patients withpersistent pain after partial or total knee arthroplasty, and to those with sports injuriesand pain after ligament reconstruction, and for those too young for joint replacement.This review includes description of the neuroanatomy, the nerve block technique, thesurgical approach and the results of Dellon’s partial knee denervation over the pasttwenty years. *Corresponding author: A. Lee Dellon, Professor, Department of Plastic Surgery and Neurosurgery, Johns Hopkins University,1122 Kenilworth Dr, suite 18, Towson,Baltimore, Maryland, USA, Tel: 410 299 6927; Fax: 410 337 0040; E-mail: [email protected] Received September 08, 2014; Accepted November 25, 2014; Published November 27, 2014 Citation: A. Lee Dellon (2015) Partial Knee Joint Denervation for Knee Pain: A Review. J Sports Med Doping Stud 5: 153. doi:10.4172/2161-0673.1000153 Copyright: © 2015 A. Lee Dellon. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.