Beyond the Surgical Bill: Pharmacoeconomics and Real-World Utilization Across the Knee Osteoarthritis Care Pathway-A Critical Narrative Review.

Background

Knee osteoarthritis (KOA) is often framed as degenerative knee pain, yet behaves as a decades-long care pathway in which medication, injections, comorbidity, productivity loss, and surgery accumulate into a major economic footprint. This critical narrative review synthesizes pharmacoeconomic and pharmacoepidemiologic evidence across that pathway.

Methods

Structured source identification was conducted in PubMed, Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar for publications from 2000 to 2026, with citation tracking. Sources were appraised against predefined critical-interpretation domains and mapped narratively rather than pooled; no meta-analysis was performed.

Results

Global Burden of Disease 2019 estimates approximately 364.6 million prevalent KOA cases worldwide. Reported evidence indicates that KOA spending is highly concentrated: in a large U.S. claims analysis, knee arthroplasty was performed in approximately 8.8% of patients yet accounted for 61.5% of KOA-related costs, whereas hyaluronic acid represented 3.0% of overall costs; the remaining pathway burden was distributed across years of outpatient care, analgesics, injections, and other nonsurgical utilization. Medication and injection findings were stage- and phenotype-dependent, and observational studies associated opioid exposure with higher fall risk, healthcare utilization, and cost. Intra-articular hyaluronic acid was repeatedly associated with longer time to arthroplasty, interpreted here as an association limited by confounding and immortal-time bias, not a causal effect; platelet-rich plasma value remained price- and durability-sensitive.

Conclusions

KOA economics resembles an iceberg-arthroplasty is the visible peak, while the submerged mass is years of pathway-level care. Value-based policy should measure the full pathway, not the surgical episode, using linked claims, registries, patient-reported outcomes, and productivity data.