There are multiple reasons why a knee can start hurting again after you've had a well-functioning total knee replacement. The most common reason that we see is patients will do well after a surgery, go to the physical therapy, get their motion, get their strength and then stop doing the exercises because they're feeling good. What happens is you get a few years out and you may be active but your muscles are relatively weak compared to what they were. So the ligaments around the actual knee replacement and around your knee have to work harder and therefore causes a bit of pain. So getting back to doing your exercises and doing them on a regular basis kind of throughout your life and keeping strong, will help you not have that knee pain as you go forward. There are other reasons that can cause pain in a knee replacement that can be a cause of that and not just strength, so those are things that we can look at through x-ray and through examination. They can possibly show that the components may be loose. There may be a low underlying infection. Those are things that we can rule out in the office. But far and away the most common reason is just a lack of doing the exercises and by doing that getting back to a normal functional knee replacement.
