Valgus bracing.

Background of the study:

Knee osteoarthritis (OA) is one of the most common joint disorders and is a major cause of knee pain and immobility. Treatment can be non-operative or operative. Operative treatment is not suitable for every patient, because of medical comorbidity, old age or other circumstances. In young patients it is desirable to delay primary arthroplasty. Osteoarthritis of the knee is more located in the medial compartment. Patients with OA of the medial compartment also often have a varus alignment and the varus deformity causes an overlaoad of the medial compartment with increasing symptoms during weight bearing. malalignment increases risk for progression of knee OA. Valgus braces are designed to unlaod the medial compartment in order to decrease pain and improve function. Recent systematic reviews concluded that there is very limited evidence for the effectiveness of brace treatment for medial knee osteoarthritis, mainly because of lack of randomized clinical trials. More than 30 commercially available braces are produced nowadays, with al kind of different brace designs. To our knowledge no study has compared the effectiveness of two different kind of braces as treatment of medial knee OA in a randomized clinical trial.

Our primary objective is to compare the short term (3 months) clinical and radiographic results of the Bledsoe Thruster with the SofTec OA Brace in the management of patients with medial knee OA and a varus leg alignment.

Baseline, 2 weeks and 3 months.

Trial arm 1: 3 months prescription of the Bledsoe Thruster Brace.

Trial arm 2: 3 months prescription of the SofTec OA Brace.