Long-Term Outcome After Surgical Treatment of Acute and Chronic Quadriceps Tendon Rupture

Quadriceps tendon ruptures (QTR) are uncommon injuries of knee extensor mechanism. Although immediate repair is necessary to re-establish knee extensor continuity, favorable outcome of QTR reconstruction even several years after injury is reported.
The outcome of acute and chronic QTR is rarely investigated. The current study aimed at evaluating the objective and subjective measures of outcome following the surgery of acute and chronic QTR.
A total of 6 QTR injuries, 3 acute and 3 chronic cases, in subjects with the mean age of 31.66 ± 12.7 years and mean follow-up of 4.3 ± 2.5 years were retrospectively evaluated. Pre- and post-operative subjective measures including international knee documentation committee (IKDC), modified Cincinnati knee scores, and objective measures including range of motion (ROM) and extension lag were used to evaluate the outcomes.
ROM improvement was 36.6° in acute and 33.3° in chronic injuries. Extension lag improvement was 28.3° in acute and 26.7° in chronic injuries. IKDC improvement was 72.8 in acute and 62.4 in chronic injuries. Improvement of modified Cincinnati was 72.6 in acute and 64.7 in chronic injuries. No post-operative complications were observed in the studied series, while all cases re-established their pre-operative activity level.
According to the current study results, delayed repair of QTR injury adversely affected the outcome of surgery. Meanwhile, surgical reconstruction of chronic QTR is still warranted regarding the considerable post-surgical improvement of the outcome measures.