Knee Replacement “Clicking” Following knee replacement surgery,
patients sometimes report hearing clicks or a clicking sound
during certain activities or at a certain point or points during
their gait cycle. In most cases, this sound is believed to be
benign and is not associated with pain or other adverse
consequences. So what causes this clicking? To answer this
question, it is helpful to understand a little bit about the
nature of total knee replacement. In knee replacement, the ends
of the bones that make up the knee joint are “resurfaced” with
metal and plastic components. The surgeon uses specialized
instrumentation and surgical technique to properly align the
implants to the bones and the bones to one another. This
alignment is not straightforward because in the replaced knee
joint, as in the normal knee, the bones are not “mechanically
interconnected”; rather the joint is constrained by the
remaining soft tissue (ligaments, muscles/tendons) and the
conformity of the implant components. During the knee