Introduction:

The two most commonly used types of prostheses are the total knee prosthesis with posterior cruciate ligament preservation and posterior cruciate ligament replacement.

Objective:

To assess whether there is a difference in functionality between the two procedures.

Material and methods:

Observational, retrospective and cross-sectional study with 134 patients divided into group A (N = 67) with ligament preservation and group B (N = 67) with posterior substituting. Using the American Association Scale for Knee Prosthetics with Insall modification to assess functionality. Statistical analysis: use of χ2 with Yates correction.

Results:

In group A the results: excellent (31%); good (24%); regular (22%) bad (22%). In group B the results: excellent (34%); good (31%); regular (16%) and bad (19%); without statistical difference between the two groups.

Conclusions:

No statistically significant difference was observed between age, gender, laterality of injury, or between number of patients with excellent results, good regular and bad according to the scale used. The high percentage of poor results in both groups of this series for the knee prosthesis is striking.