Fatal fat embolism following total condylar knee arthroplasty

Less Invasive TKA

“…Invasion of the femoral IM canal increases the fat emboli rate to the lungs and brain during TKA [6,25,29,30,41,42,49,50,57]. In a small percentage of patients, this phenomenon may lead to clinical symptoms such as mental confusion.…”

“…Transesophageal echocardiography during the course of conventional IM instrumented total knee procedures has demonstrated showers of fat or intramedullary embolic particles enter the right atrium of the heart in repeated and unpredictable patterns [5,6,10,12,20,22,25,28,29,39,41,42,[48][49][50]57]. Most often these are clinically unimportant.…”

Surgical navigation for total knee arthroplasty: A perspective

“…It is expected that a new class of surgical tools will emerge, that are designed to be used specifically with navigation systems. Complications such as fat embolism associated with the use of the intramedullary alignment rod (Caillouette and Anzel, 1990;Monto et al, 1990) might be reduced with such instrumentation. Instead of optical tracking systems, the next generation of navigation systems is exploring the use of electromagnetic tracking, which are typically physically smaller than, and do not have the lineof-sight concerns of, their optical counterparts.…”

Embolic phenomena during computer-assisted and conventional total knee replacement

“…[1][2][3][4][5][6] They are widely believed to be the cause of intra-operative hypotension and reduced cardiac output, which may lead to circulatory collapse and sudden death. [7][8][9] Emboli have been variously described as consisting of elements of marrow, 2,3 thrombus, 1 fat 2,10 and bone particles 11 released during preparation of the femur and tibia.…”