Biomechanical Comparison Between the Cruciate Suture and a Single Vertical Suture Used for Arthroscopic Meniscal Repair: Letter to the Editor

Dear Editor: I recently read with interest the article titled “Biomechanical Comparison of Parallel and Crossed Suture Repair for Longitudinal Meniscus Tears” by Milchteim et al published in the April 2016 issue of the Orthopaedic Journal of Sports Medicine (OJSM). The article is great and adds a lot to the current available knowledge, and I believe that it is of great interest to the readers of OJSM. However, in the discussion section, the authors kindly mentioned and commented on an article that I published in Arthroscopy in 2006 titled “The ‘Cruciate Suture’ for Arthroscopic Meniscal Repair: A New Technique,” saying, “Abdelkafy and colleagues proposed that a ‘cruciate’ repair pattern failed at 110 N whereas a simple vertical suture failed at 67 N.” They added, “Regarding longitudinal tears, this current study found no difference between a more complex crossed pattern and a simple parallel repair pattern.” I would like to clarify that we compared the ultimate tension load (UTL) of the cruciate suture versus the UTL of a single vertical suture and that is why we found a significant difference between the 2 sutures. The authors in the aforementioned article compared the crossed suture (cruciate suture) with 2 vertical sutures, and this is probably the reason why they did not find a significant difference between the 2 constructs. We are appreciative of the comment regarding our study by the authors of the aforementioned article and only wanted to clarify the difference between the biomechanical tests used in each study.