Meniscal Bucket-Handle Tears and Return to Sports in Young Adults: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Bucket-handle tears represent a subtype of meniscal injuries that involve a full-thickness longitudinal tear. These tears are challenging and demanding. The present systematic review and meta-analysis aimed to evaluate return-to-sport outcomes in young adults with isolated bucket-handle meniscal tears treated surgically through meniscal repair. This review followed the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines, with two independent reviewers selecting studies from PubMed, Web of Science, and Scopus databases. Studies were included if they involved patients over 16 years old, with isolated bucket-handle tears, a minimum of one-year follow-up, and reported postoperative Tegner scores. Five studies comprising 168 individual knees met these criteria and were analyzed. Quality assessment employed the Newcastle-Ottawa Scale. Data analysis was conducted in R (R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria) for pooled outcome calculations. The primary outcome was the postoperative Tegner score, representing a return to sports; secondary outcomes included changes in Tegner and Lysholm scores and failure rates. Two cohort studies and three case series were included, with quality ratings ranging from fair to poor. The mean patient age was 27.8 years, and the mean follow-up was 82.4 months. The pooled postoperative Tegner score was 5.94 (95% CI: 5.41-6.46), indicating a high return to recreational sports. The mean change in Tegner score was 2.48 (p = 0.0604), which was not statistically significant, while Lysholm score improvement was significant at 31.16 points (p = 0.0093). The pooled failure rate across studies was 14% (95% CI: 0-42%). Patients with isolated bucket-handle meniscal tears undergoing surgical repair demonstrate a high rate of return to recreational sports, with significant improvements in Lysholm scores. However, failure rates and study quality variability suggest further high-quality research to make safer conclusions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.011 | 0.025 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.018 | 0.033 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".