Prevalence of baker cyst in patients presenting with knee pain

Objective: To determine the prevalence of Baker cyst in patients presenting with knee pain. Methodology: This retrospective descriptive study was conducted on 169 patients in the Department of Surgery, Heavy Industries Taxila (HIT) Hospital, Taxila from January to December 2020, presenting with unilateral knee pain for more than 3 months. The patients were subjected to high frequency ultrasound examination for the diagnosis of Baker cyst. The data were stratified according to age, gender, duration of disease and side of knee involved. A p < 0.05 was considered statistically significant. We used SPSS 25. Results: Out of 169 patients, 97 (57.4%) were females. Mean age was 37.55 ± 12.1 years. Mean duration of knee pain was 10.82 ± 4.96 months. Right side knee was involved in 109 (64.5%) patients. Fortyone (24.3%) patients had sonographic evidence of Baker cyst. Stratification showed that there was no difference between age, gender, and side of the knee in terms of prevalence of Baker cyst (p values 0.740, 0.371, 0.835, respectively). The duration of knee pain had significant impact on prevalence (p = 0.021). Conclusion: The sonographic evaluation of painful knee joint is worthwhile to detect Baker cyst, which was found in 29% of patients in our study. The metacentric studies with large sample size would provide more insight after incorporating various knee joint pathologies. (author)