Unilateral Anthroscopy for CCL

Summary of our dealings with Cranial cruciate ligament rupture (CR) in both our dogs this past winter due to ice covered deep snow in the yard.

We took our Burmese (Bismarck) to the Alta Vista Vet Hospital in Ottawa for what we anticipated was going to be a $4-5K TPLO surgery.

The Surgeon was very practical and due to Bismarck’s age (7yrs) and with a potential life span of only 8-10 yrs he suggested we do a ‘Unilateral Anthroscopy’ instead and clean up the damaged meniscus in the knee joint.

It made sense and we went ahead with it and had both of Bismarck's knees done. It cost about $3k and was performed about 4 weeks ago. The pluses; not a traumatic bone surgery, just the scope holes so the wounds healed very fast and the rehab has been excellent.

We took our Pyrenees (Reacher) in this week for the same procedure on only one knee and he’s begun his rehab. So far very impressed in the look of the knee, even after 3 days we see a huge improvement in it’s movement etc.

So in the end the costs are about ½ of a TPLO and gets the knee back to being more comfortable for the dog. We will still have them on some low level anti inflammatory for their arthritis, but that’s manageable.

the procedure:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24892866

Interesting. Thanks for this. My Britt had the TPLO on his left side and partially tore his right side. He is only on a joint supplement and the vet recommended to not operate. He’s now mostly retired from hunting and except for that lives a normal life. I expect arthritis will start earlier than normal.

update:

Both dogs are done their re-hab and we're very happy with the end results. Much better than the issues we went true with the 3 TPLO surgeries we had done on other dogs in the past. The dogs required far less time in isolation as they had the ability to weight bear sooner. The restricted walking exercises went much smother with a lot less worry about 'undoing' the surgery.
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So financial a much better alternative and with from all appearances an equally viable solution to a TPLO.