Demographic processes taking place in modern society lead to a sharp increase in the population of elderly and senile people. The effectiveness of providing specialized care to patients with degenerative diseases of the large joints of the lower extremities reflects not only the effectiveness of the specialized service of a particular region but also the health care system as a whole.
At the same time, diseases of the knee joint make up from 13 to 29% of all degenerative pathologies of the skeleton. Despite recent advances in genetics and molecular biology, the pathogenesis of osteoarthritis is largely an unsolved problem, which leads to the ineffectiveness of existing conservative therapy schemes.
The presence of chronic degenerative pathologies of the knee joint is the cause of persistent pain in older patients, which leads to their long-term maladaptation and often makes them dependent on outside care.
Endoprosthetics of large joints remains one of the most effective technologies of surgical treatment. However, the possibility of early and long-term postoperative complications makes more and more numerous groups of researchers study the causes of adverse results, both in the postoperative and preoperative periods.
Some optimism is inspired by rapidly developing cellular technologies that allow managing the regeneration of stem stromal cells, while their implementation in clinical practice remains within the framework of scientific developments.
Predicting the future is not possible without a detailed analysis of past events. However, the analysis of historical sources and key events of the past, in general, requires scrupulous adherence to the methodology.
We intentionally narrow the anatomical boundaries of the problem under consideration in the context of the knee joint as a «mathematical» model of historical understanding of the degenerative pathology of large joints.
The authors do not claim to be a complete description of this vast interdisciplinary field of clinical medicine but only tried to analyze the key historical events and the role of those individuals in history who created a modern understanding of the problem.
The authors will be grateful for your feedback and suggestions.