Part of Total knee replacement rehab
Partial vs total knee replacement: how do they differ?
Warning signs, and when to get help
What is the difference between a partial and a total knee replacement?
A total knee replacement resurfaces the worn surfaces throughout the joint. A partial knee replacement resurfaces one worn compartment and leaves the rest of the knee, including its own ligaments, in place. Keep hold of that difference. Nearly everything further down follows from it, and so does the reason these two cannot be set against each other like two sizes of one operation.
The knee has three compartments: the inner side, the outer side, and the one between the kneecap and the thighbone. OrthoInfo is blunt about what a partial needs: arthritis limited to one of those compartments. Wear spread across more than one takes the partial off the table, whatever anyone would prefer.
In a total replacement, OrthoInfo describes the damaged cartilage surfaces at the ends of the thighbone and shinbone being removed with a little of the bone beneath them, and metal parts put in to recreate the joint surface. One line in it is worth repeating: only the surfaces are replaced, not the knee. Most people picture something far more wholesale.
Even a total is not quite the same operation everywhere, and this is the part worth knowing before you go in. OrthoInfo describes the undersurface of the kneecap being cut and resurfaced with a plastic button as part of a total replacement, then adds that some surgeons do not resurface the kneecap, depending on the case. So what a total replacement covers differs between surgeons on that one point. Whether yours will be resurfaced is a question for the surgeon doing it, and their answer is the one that applies to you.
Names differ between countries and between clinics, and that makes searching harder than it should be. A partial knee replacement is also called a unicompartmental knee replacement, and some units and some patients call it a half knee replacement. They are the same operation. Total knee replacement and total knee arthroplasty are likewise the same thing.
What this page does not get into is the operations themselves. How either is done, what the parts are made of and how they are held in place belong to the surgeon who would do yours.
Who is considered for each, and who decides?
The surgeon decides what to offer and you decide whether to accept it. The offer itself, though, is built out of findings nobody can check at the kitchen table. For a partial, OrthoInfo describes pain sitting almost entirely on the inner or the outer part of the knee, and lists inflammatory arthritis, a knee that is too stiff, and ligaments that feel weak or torn among the reasons someone may not be eligible.
There is a third route that most comparisons of these two operations leave out altogether. OrthoInfo sets out where the pain sits as the first thing the surgeon asks about: pain almost entirely on the inside or the outside of the knee may point to a partial, pain throughout the whole knee may point to a total, and pain at the front, under the kneecap, may make someone a better candidate for a patellofemoral replacement, which resurfaces that front compartment instead of one of the side ones. It is a partial replacement too, so if your pain sits under your kneecap, ask about it by name rather than assuming that a partial has to mean the inner or the outer side.
Read that as what the team is weighing up, not as a test you can apply to yourself. Every item on it comes from an examination or a scan, and one symptom can come out of several different states of a joint. Anyone who tells you from your description alone which operation you need is guessing.
Whether an operation is on the table at all is a separate question, and a live one for plenty of people reading this. When is a knee replacement necessary, and who decides? covers it, including what a surgeon weighs and why no X-ray grade settles it. NICE asks clinicians to base a referral for joint replacement on assessing the person rather than on scoring how severe the disease looks (NICE NG226). If you have not yet worked through the non-surgical options, surgery for knee arthritis: when to consider it has that side of it and the knee osteoarthritis program is the exercise half.
There is one part of this that catches people out, so raise it at the appointment. OrthoInfo describes the surgeon opening the front of the knee and exploring all three compartments to confirm that the cartilage damage really is confined to one and that the ligaments are intact. If the surgeon judges that a partial is not right for that knee, it says they may do a total instead, and that they will have discussed this back-up plan with you beforehand to make sure you agree with it. So that conversation is one you are owed, not one you have to prise open. Ask what your consent form covers, and what the plan is if the joint looks different once they are in there. It is much easier to have beforehand than afterward.
Does the X-ray decide it?
Not on its own, and not finally. Imaging narrows the choice and the examination narrows it further. The inside of the joint gets the last word.
OrthoInfo describes X-rays as showing how far the arthritis and any deformity have gone, and says an MRI scan may be added to look more closely at the cartilage in the compartment where the arthritis sits. For a total replacement it describes a history, an examination, X-rays and sometimes other tests, with advanced imaging used occasionally rather than routinely. Remember that the ligaments and the stiffness of the knee are examination findings, not pictures. That is part of why a scan report read on its own tells you less than you would hope.
What a film cannot do is tell you how much your knee is costing you, and the operation is offered for the cost rather than for the picture. The bone on bone question, and how loosely X-ray changes track with knee pain, are covered with their sources on when is a knee replacement necessary.
What differs in the recovery and the rehabilitation?
The published patient sources all point one way here, and they are careful about how they put it. The NHS says recovery after a partial knee replacement should be shorter than after a total one. It also says full recovery from a knee replacement may take several months or longer, and that your age and general health affect how long it takes.
For the partial, OrthoInfo lists a quicker recovery, less pain afterwards, less blood loss and a lower risk of infection and clots among the advantages, says weight goes onto the knee immediately after surgery, with a walker, cane or crutches likely for the first several days or weeks until walking without help is comfortable, and puts a return to all regular daily activities most likely by 6 weeks. For the total it says most normal activities of daily living should be possible within 3 to 6 weeks. Those are statements about groups of patients, and the figures your own surgeon and physiotherapist or physical therapist give you are the ones that apply to you.
One practical difference is already written into national advice. The NHS says to wait at least 6 weeks after a total knee replacement, or 3 weeks after a partial one, and to check with your doctor that you are fit to drive. Driving after a knee replacement takes both those figures further, including the braking test and the medicines question that sit behind the clearance.
There is a catch in any claim that one operation recovers faster, and it is not a small one. The two are offered to different knees. A partial needs the wear confined to one compartment, so the people having one tend to start with less damage, and part of the difference in recovery belongs to the knee rather than to the operation. None of that makes the difference imaginary. It does mean the sentence "partials recover faster" is partly a sentence about who gets a partial.
What the rehabilitation asks of you differs less than the timeline does. Either way the work is the same three things: getting the knee straight, getting it to bend, and getting the thigh muscle strong enough to control the leg on stairs and on the way down a step. Either way the early weeks are where the straightening is won or lost, which is practice experience rather than a figure from a trial. What changes is the pace, and what your team asks you to avoid and for how long. So the question worth asking before either operation is what rehabilitation comes with it, who provides it, and how many appointments, which is a more answerable question than how long the recovery takes.
For the shape of recovery after a total, the recovery timeline week by week sets out what the sources say. Whichever operation you end up having, you begin rehabilitation with the strength you walked in with, so the waiting months are not dead time: prehab exercises before a knee replacement and waiting for physio are written for them. The two questions patients ask most about that period have their own pages too, weight loss and knee arthritis and is walking good for knee arthritis.
What is the trade-off, and what is actually known about it?
The trade-off, as the evidence has it, is between more further surgery on one side and more medical complications on the other. How big either half is depends on whether you are reading a randomized trial or a national registry, and the two genuinely disagree in size.
Two words carry most of the figures below, and they do not mean the same thing. A revision is another operation to change or replace part of the implant. A reoperation is any further operation on that knee, which includes a revision and also smaller procedures, so the reoperation number is always the larger of the two. If a surgeon quotes you one of these, it is worth asking which one you have just been given.
Start with the trial, because it is the only design that removes the problem of the two operations going to different knees. TOPKAT recruited 528 people with osteoarthritis in the inner compartment of the knee at 27 UK hospitals between 2010 and 2013, and allocated them at random to a partial or a total replacement. At 10 years, with 326 of 444 eligible participants responding, the Oxford Knee Score ruled out a clinically meaningful difference between the two. Counted by the operation people actually received, complications had occurred in 22% of the partial group against 27% of the total group, reoperation of any kind in 9% of each group, and revision in 6% of the partial group against 4% of the total group; counted by the operation they were randomly allocated to, complications were 21% against 29%, revision 5% in each group and reoperation 8% against 10% (Beard and colleagues, 2026). Which of the two counts you read matters, because the allocated figures are the ones a trial is designed to produce. The same trial's 5-year report found no difference in knee scores and similar rates of reoperation and complications (Beard and colleagues, 2019).
Note who was in it, and who did the operations. Everyone had late stage wear confined to the inner compartment and the average age was 65, so the trial answers the question for knees where both operations were genuinely possible, and not for any other knee. The operations were also done either by surgeons expert in both of them or by a surgeon with particular expertise in the one allocated (Beard and colleagues, 2026). That is a deliberate part of the design, and it is worth holding on to: a trial like this measures these two operations in the hands of surgeons who do them well, where a registry measures them in everybody's hands.
The registry comparisons are much larger and they come out differently. Using National Joint Registry data for England and Wales, 25,334 partial replacements were matched with 75,996 total replacements, and over 8 years revision was about twice as likely after the partial. Deaths went the other way, along with length of stay, complications including clots, heart attack and stroke, and readmissions, all of which were lower after the partial. The authors put it as roughly one death fewer and three reoperations more for every 100 people moved from a total to a partial in the first 4 years (Liddle and colleagues, 2014). A later matched analysis of 54,215 pairs from the same registry family followed people for 10 years and reported revision in 12% of partial replacements against 5% of total ones, reoperation of any kind in 25% against 21%, and death in 13.6% against 15.5% (Mohammad and colleagues, 2022).
Those last figures are averages across every age, and the same authors went on to show that the balance moves with age and in one band turns around completely. Over 10 years, for every 100 people who had a partial rather than a total, they calculated 7 more reoperations and 1 fewer death under the age of 55, 6 more reoperations and 2 more deaths at 55 to 64, 4 more reoperations and 2 fewer deaths at 65 to 74, and 3 more reoperations and 4 fewer deaths at 75 and over (Mohammad and colleagues, 2022). Read that carefully before you take a lower death rate as a property of the partial operation. It is an average across ages, it ran the other way in one age group in this analysis, and the same caution about who was chosen for which operation applies to all of it.
Hold the two kinds of evidence apart, because this is where most of the confusion in this comparison lives. A registry records what happened in everyday practice across hundreds of surgeons, and that is its strength. Nobody in one was allocated at random, and that is its limit.
Matching narrows the gap between the two groups on what has been recorded and cannot close it on what has not, including how worn each knee was, how fit for an operation the person in front of the surgeon was, and how experienced that surgeon was with the partial operation. The fitness one bears directly on the death rates, because the healthier of two otherwise similar patients is the likelier to be offered a partial. A trial fixes that and buys a much smaller number of people in selected units. Where the two disagree, as they do here on how often a partial is revised, the honest reading is a range and not a figure.
Satisfaction is the weakest part of the whole comparison, and the honest thing is to say so instead of filling the gap. The large comparisons measure revision, reoperation, complications, death and function scores. How satisfied people were, and how natural the knee felt, are not what those studies set out to count, and we have found no head to head figure for them worth quoting. TOPKAT also reported that cost-effectiveness favored the partial operation, which is a finding about health service spending rather than a reason for one person to prefer one operation (Beard and colleagues, 2026).
So there is no recommendation here, and that is deliberate, not a dodge. Similar function scores in a trial, different patterns of further surgery and complications in the registries, and different rules about who is eligible in the first place: none of that can be ranked for a knee nobody here has examined.
If you have already had a partial knee replacement
If that is you, read this before you read anything else on the site. Our total knee replacement rehab program, and the week by week pages that go with it, were written for recovery after a first total knee replacement. They are not written for a partial.
Why that matters is straightforward. After a partial, parts of your own joint and your own ligaments are still doing their job, and the plan your surgical team sets takes account of which parts those are. Timescales can differ, so can what you are asked to avoid and for how long, and so can what counts as normal progress. Follow the plan from the team that operated, and ask your physiotherapist or physical therapist to work from that plan rather than from anything here. Two of the everyday questions do answer the partial separately, and both are worth reading with your own operation in mind: driving after a knee replacement carries the shorter NHS wait after a partial, and kneeling after a knee replacement has a section on whether kneeling differs after one.
The warning signs at the foot of this page are worth reading whichever operation you had, because infection, clots, a break in the bone after a fall and a knee that stops settling are not specific to one of them. What is specific to your knee is everything else, so the team that did the operation is the one to call. Read one detail in that list against your own operation, though. The timing it gives for freeing up a stiff knee under anesthetic comes from research on total knee replacement, so if you had a partial, ask your own surgical team what the thresholds and the timings are for your knee.
If you were told you are not suitable for a partial
Plenty of people reach this subject having already been told a partial is not an option for them. What usually went unexplained is why.
From OrthoInfo, the reasons that rule it out are arthritis that is not confined to one compartment, inflammatory arthritis, a knee that is too stiff, and ligaments that are weak or torn. Every one of those is a finding about a joint, not a judgement about a person. A knee that lost a lot of its meniscus or a ligament years ago, for example, is part of the history your team takes for exactly that reason. One thing to check before you settle for a total, though: if your arthritis is confined to the front of the knee under the kneecap rather than to the inner or outer side, OrthoInfo describes a patellofemoral replacement as the partial operation that fits that pattern, so it is worth asking whether it was considered and why it was ruled out.
So ask the question directly. Which of those applied to my knee, and was it the imaging or the examination that showed it. The answer is usually specific, and it tends to settle the matter in a way that reading around it never quite does.
What to ask at your appointment
These are the ones that tend to pay for themselves when both operations are in play. Treat them as a conversation opener, not a checklist to work through.
- Which operation do you suggest for my knee, and what rules the other one out?
- What did the imaging and the examination show that led you there?
- Is there a chance the plan changes during the operation, and what does my consent cover if it does?
- What differs in my first weeks at home between the two, for me rather than on average?
- What are your own figures for further surgery after the one you are suggesting, and is that revisions or every reoperation?
- What rehabilitation comes with it, who provides it, and how many appointments can I expect?
- If I have a partial and it is converted to a total later, what does that operation and that recovery involve?
- What would you want me to do between now and the operation?
Write down the two or three activities you most want back before you go in. It keeps the appointment on your life rather than on your scan, and it is a surprisingly hard thing to answer on the spot.
When to get the knee looked at sooner
Some knee changes do not wait for a planned appointment, whether you are still deciding or already recovering from either operation.
A knee that swells up within hours of a twist or a fall, one that looks out of shape, or one that leaves the foot cold, pale or numb needs an emergency department straight away, and you should not drive yourself. A hot, red and swollen knee, a knee with a temperature alongside it, a knee that locks or keeps giving way, and a calf that is newly swollen, warm or tender all need medical advice the same day.
After either operation, the same day list grows. A wound that leaks, a knee whose pain and swelling are building rather than settling, a new temperature at any point even years later, a sudden loss of your ability to straighten the knee or lift the leg, and a fall or a knock onto the new joint all mean contacting your surgical team that day rather than waiting. A temperature is not what makes an infected joint worth reporting. OrthoInfo names increased pain or stiffness in a joint that had been working well among the signs of an infection around a new joint, says the signs can be as little as mild redness and swelling, and says fever is no longer considered a sign of one. Sudden breathlessness or chest pain means calling emergency services.
The warning signs below give the full set with the level of urgency for each. Problems after a knee replacement takes the same list in order of how fast to act and adds who to call and what to have ready, and the total knee replacement rehab page carries the list as well. None of them is a reason to decide anything about which operation to have, and all of them are reasons to be seen before your next routine appointment.
Related exercise programs
Warning signs
Get emergency help now
- Emergency: the knee has moved out of place, looks misshapen or is pointing at an odd angle, or you have tingling or no feeling in the knee, leg or toes, or your foot turns cold, pale or blue. Go to an emergency department straight away. Do not drive yourself: ask someone to drive you or call an ambulance.
- Emergency: the knee became very swollen very quickly, within a few hours of a twist, fall or blow, or you felt a pop or snap. Go to an emergency department straight away. Do not drive yourself: ask someone to drive you or call an ambulance.
- Emergency: since your operation, you suddenly become short of breath, you get chest pain or pain in your upper back that may be worse when you breathe in, you cough up blood, your heart is beating very fast, or you faint. Call emergency services straight away, even if your leg looks normal. These can be signs of a blood clot in the lungs (pulmonary embolism).
- Emergency: after a fall or a knock, you cannot put weight on the leg, your knee or thigh is very painful, or the leg looks out of shape or shorter than the other. Go to an emergency department straight away, and do not drive yourself. If you cannot get up, call emergency services. A broken bone around a knee replacement is rare, but it needs treatment in hospital. If a smaller fall or knock leaves the knee newly painful, swollen or bruised, even if you can still walk on it and the leg looks normal, stop the exercises, go back to your crutches or sticks and keep your full weight off that leg, and get it checked by your surgical team the same day. A break in the bone around a new knee is not always obvious at first, and walking normally on one can move the broken ends apart.
Get help today
- Same day: the pain started with a fall, a twist or a blow to the knee, or you cannot put weight on the leg. Get medical advice the same day.
- Same day: the knee is locked, which means it is stuck bent and you cannot fully straighten it, even after gently trying to move it, or you cannot bend or straighten the leg at all. Get assessed the same day by a doctor, at urgent care or at an emergency department. A torn piece of meniscus can get caught in the joint and block it, and when a tear like this can be repaired, it should be done as early as possible. A knee that catches for a moment and then frees itself can happen with a meniscus tear. That is not the same as a locked knee, but tell your physio or doctor about it.
- Same day: the knee keeps giving way under you, or it gave way after a recent injury, or it gives way and is also very painful or swollen. Get medical advice the same day. If it only happens now and then, with no recent injury and no swelling, it is not an emergency, but book an assessment with a physio or doctor in the next few days.
- Same day: the knee swells up with no clear reason, especially if you take medicine to thin your blood. Get medical advice the same day.
- Same day: the knee is hot, red and swollen, or you have knee pain with a high temperature or feel hot, cold or shivery. Get medical advice the same day, and go to an emergency department if you feel very unwell. This can be a sign of infection in the joint, which needs treatment quickly.
- Same day: your wound becomes more red, hot, swollen or painful, starts to leak or ooze, is still leaking in the second week or has never stopped, has pus coming out of it or its edges start to come apart, or you have a high temperature or feel hot, cold or shivery. Contact your surgical team or get medical advice the same day. Redness can be harder to see on brown or black skin. If you feel very unwell, go to an emergency department. If you have a very high or very low temperature, shivering you cannot control, you are breathing very fast or finding it hard to breathe, you are confused or your speech is slurred, your skin, lips or tongue look blue, gray, pale or blotchy (on brown or black skin this can be easier to see on the palms of the hands or soles of the feet), or you have a rash that does not fade when you press it, call emergency services, as this can be sepsis.
- Same day: since your operation, the redness, warmth, swelling or pain in your knee is not getting better or is getting worse, for example the knee pain keeps building both when you move and when you rest. Contact your surgical team or get medical advice the same day, as this can be a sign of infection around the new joint. If you feel very unwell, go to an emergency department.
- Same day: at any time after your operation, even years later, new pain in your new knee along with a high temperature or feeling hot, cold or shivery, or a knee that becomes hot, red or swollen, which counts on its own, with or without pain and with or without a temperature. Contact your surgical team or get medical advice the same day. A new joint can become infected long after the operation, and that needs treating quickly. A normal temperature is not an all clear: OrthoInfo says fever is no longer considered a sign of an infection after a joint replacement, that the signs can be as little as mild redness and swelling and sometimes there are none at all, and that increased pain or stiffness in a joint that had been working well is one of them. So do not wait for a temperature before you report new or increasing pain in your new knee to your surgical team.
- Same day: you suddenly cannot straighten your knee or lift your leg straight when you could before, often after a pop, a tearing feeling or a stumble, or you notice a dip just above or below your kneecap, or you suddenly cannot put weight on the leg, even without a fall. Keep your weight off it and contact your surgical team the same day. If you cannot reach them that day, go to an emergency department. A tendon at the front of the knee may have torn, and a repair works better when it is done soon.
- Same day: a calf or thigh that is newly swollen or getting more swollen, warm, tender, red or darker than usual, has swollen veins that are sore to touch, or has a throbbing or cramping pain that does not fit your injury or condition, or that feels different from normal muscle soreness after exercise. This can be a sign of a blood clot (deep vein thrombosis), especially after surgery, an injury, time in a cast or boot, a long trip or a spell of being much less mobile than usual. Get medical advice the same day. If you are also short of breath or have chest pain, call emergency services.
- Same day: pain at night or at rest that keeps getting worse. If you are being treated for cancer now, contact your cancer team the same day.
Book an appointment
- Within a day or two: pain at night or at rest that keeps getting worse. If you have had cancer, now or in the past, see your doctor sooner, within a day or two, and mention it, even if the pain is not getting worse. Do the same if you have knee pain and are losing weight without trying, even if it does not hurt at night.
- Within a few days: pain at night or at rest that keeps getting worse. See your doctor within a few days.
- Within a few days: your knee is not bending or straightening any further from week to week, is getting stiffer, or feels unstable or gives way when you stand or walk. This is not an emergency, but contact your physio or surgical team within the next few days rather than waiting for your next routine appointment, and keep using your walking aid until they have checked it. A stiff knee is easier to free up early than late: where it has to be freed up under anesthetic, doing that earlier, generally within about 6 to 12 weeks of the operation, is associated with regaining more movement than doing it later, although how much any one knee gains also depends on how stiff it was to begin with, on who is suitable and on the rehabilitation afterward. So the date you raise it matters (Hosanee and colleagues, 2026). If the knee has given way and let you fall, or it gives way on stairs, hold a rail and use your walking aid every time, and stay off stairs on your own until you have been seen.
- Within a few days: you have had a fall, even if you were not hurt, or you keep tripping, stumbling or feeling that your legs might give way. Book an appointment with your doctor within a few days and ask about a falls assessment. Tell them about every fall, even the ones where you were not hurt.
- Routine: pain in your new knee that had settled and has come back, or pain that is getting worse month by month, for example pain that starts as soon as you stand up and begin to walk. This is not an emergency, but ask your surgical team for a review, as the parts of a new joint can loosen or wear over the years. Get medical advice the same day instead, not a routine appointment, if the knee also becomes hot, red or swollen, or you have a high temperature or feel hot, cold or shivery, or the pain is building week by week rather than month by month. A new joint can become infected years after the operation, and the two can feel similar at first.
Common questions
Is the recovery faster after a partial knee replacement?
The NHS says recovery after a partial knee replacement should be shorter than after a total, and OrthoInfo lists a quicker recovery, less pain afterwards, less blood loss and a lower risk of infection and blood clots among the advantages of the partial operation. Read that alongside one thing the comparison cannot get around: the two operations go to different knees. A partial is only an option when the wear is confined to one compartment, so a group of people having partial replacements is, on average, a group with less damage to start with. Some of the difference in recovery belongs to the operation and some belongs to the knee, and no source can tell you how your own weeks will go. Your own team's figures beat any average here.
Does a partial knee replacement wear out sooner?
Further surgery has been more common after a partial in the large matched registry comparisons. Using National Joint Registry data for England and Wales, 25,334 partial replacements were matched with 75,996 total replacements, and over 8 years revision was about twice as likely after the partial, while deaths and complications such as clots, heart attack and stroke were less common after it (Liddle and colleagues, 2014). A later matched analysis of 54,215 pairs from the same registry family reported revision at 10 years in 12% of partial replacements against 5% of total ones, with reoperation of any kind in 25% against 21% (Mohammad and colleagues, 2022). Those are observational comparisons, not a lottery, and matching cannot fully remove the difference between the knees chosen for each operation. The randomized trial that put the question to chance found much lower revision figures for both operations, and no clear difference between them in the analysis by the operation people were allocated to. Both sets of numbers, and the age pattern the registry authors found in theirs, are in the trade-off section above.
Can a partial knee replacement be converted to a total later?
Yes, and OrthoInfo names exactly that as the main drawback of the partial operation: a total replacement may be needed later if the parts of the knee that were left alone wear out in their turn. Converting one is an operation in its own right, with its own recovery and its own rehabilitation plan from the team that does it, so it is not a smaller event than the first one. What the registry and trial figures above cannot do is tell you the chance for your knee, and nothing we read supports the claim, common on surgical practice websites, that most partial replacements end up converted.
Which one feels more natural?
OrthoInfo reports that patients often say a partial knee replacement feels more natural than a total one and may give better movement, and it gives a reason for it: in a partial, the healthy bone, cartilage and all of the ligaments are left in place. That is worth knowing, although it is a summary of what people report rather than a measured comparison. The best measured evidence we have read is the Oxford Knee Score in the TOPKAT trial, which asks about pain and daily function rather than how natural a knee feels, and it showed no meaningful difference between the two operations at 10 years (Beard and colleagues, 2026). Honest answer: how a new knee feels is the part of this comparison with the weakest evidence behind it, so treat any confident claim either way with care.
References
- American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons. Unicompartmental (partial) knee replacement. OrthoInfo. https://www.orthoinfo.org/en/treatment/unicompartmental-knee-replacement/
- American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons. Total knee replacement. OrthoInfo. https://www.orthoinfo.org/en/treatment/total-knee-replacement/
- American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons. Infection after joint replacement. OrthoInfo. https://www.orthoinfo.org/en/diseases--conditions/joint-replacement-infection/
- NHS. Recovering from a knee replacement. Page last reviewed 9 September 2026. https://www.nhs.uk/tests-and-treatments/knee-replacement/recovery/
- NHS. Why a knee replacement is done. Page last reviewed 9 September 2026. https://www.nhs.uk/tests-and-treatments/knee-replacement/why-its-done/
- Beard DJ, Davies LJ, Cook JA, et al. Assessing clinical and cost effectiveness of total versus partial knee replacement (TOPKAT): 10-year follow-up of a multicentre, randomised controlled trial. Lancet Rheumatology. 2026;8(2):e116-e126. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2665-9913(25)00250-4
- Beard DJ, Davies LJ, Cook JA, et al. The clinical and cost-effectiveness of total versus partial knee replacement in patients with medial compartment osteoarthritis (TOPKAT): 5-year outcomes of a randomised controlled trial. Lancet. 2019;394(10200):746-756. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(19)31281-4
- Liddle AD, Judge A, Pandit H, Murray DW. Adverse outcomes after total and unicompartmental knee replacement in 101,330 matched patients: a study of data from the National Joint Registry for England and Wales. Lancet. 2014;384(9952):1437-1445. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(14)60419-0
- Mohammad HR, Liddle AD, Judge A, Murray DW. A matched comparison of long-term outcomes of total and unicompartmental knee replacements in different ages based on national databases: analysis of data from the National Joint Registry for England, Wales, Northern Ireland, and the Isle of Man. Journal of Arthroplasty. 2022;37(2):243-251. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.arth.2021.09.018
- Hosanee S, Elebo N, Sikhauli N, Pietrzak JRT. Reluctant knee: understanding and managing stiffness after total knee arthroplasty. International Orthopaedics. 2026;50(9):2337-2346. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00264-026-06905-0
- National Institute for Health and Care Excellence. Osteoarthritis in over 16s: diagnosis and management. NICE guideline NG226. 2022. https://www.nice.org.uk/guidance/ng226
Written and checked by the PocketPhysio editorial team. Last updated 2026-10-17.
This page is general education, not a diagnosis or a personal treatment plan. See a physiotherapist or doctor for advice about your own situation.