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NT Bureau
Chennai, Apr 27:

        Saroj Gupta, a 43-year-old woman from Rajasthan, is now able to walk freely after 10 years of knee ailment, thanks to the gender specific, high-flex knee replacement she had it performed at Bharathi Raaja Speciality hospital.

        This type of knee replacement was the first of its kind surgery to be performed in South India by an Indian orthopaedic surgeon Dr A K Venkatachalam here recently.

        Informing this at a press conference yesterday, the surgeon said as women formed the majority of patients suffering from knee ailments, a new technique was needed in the surgery to suit their anatomy.

        This gender specific knee implant is designed for the female anatomy. It was introduced first in the US and more than one lakh operations have been performed so far.

        Computational studies on 800 knees have shown that there were significant differences between the knee bones of the two sexes, he said.

        In the new procedure — gender specific knee replacement — the implant has narrow femur than the earlier devices. The angle at which the knee cap tracks on the lower end of the thigh bone is higher in females. The implant is also thinner than the corresponding one for males. These differences have been factored into in the design of the new implant.

        'The advantages of using special implants for females are that the overall measurements of the device matched the natural anatomy of females more accurately.

        The female patients would experience less pain and could have improved function,' he added. This implant was designed by an US surgeon Dr Richard Booth for Zimmer Inc. The gender specific high-flex knee replacement costs around Rs 1.5 lakh.