Donor Site Evaluation After Autologous

Because of the limited capacity for self-repair of articular cartilage, treatment of articular defects has been challeng-ing. Autologous osteochondral mosaicplasty (mosaicplasty) is an innovative technique to transplant multiple cylindri-cal osteochondral grafts harvested from a less weightbear-ing area of the knee joint into the chondral defects.6-8,15 Previous studies6,7,11,12,14 reported the successful treatment of osteochondral defects in knee and ankle joints with this surgical technique. Recent studies10,19,23 have reported the application of mosaicplasty to osteochondritis dissecans of the humeral capitellum (capitellar OCD). Iwasaki et al10 have shown that mosaicplasty for advanced capitellar OCD with displaced and detached fragments in teenage baseball players can provide excellent clinical and radiographic results. Although mosaic-plasty is effective for capitellar OCD as well as osteochondral defects in the knee joint, surgeons must consider the possible adverse effect on the donor sites in performing this proce-dure, especially for young athletes. To date, only a few studies6,7,13,17 have reported on the morbidity at the graft harvest sites in doing mosaicplasty for knee cartilaginous lesions. Therefore, the effect on kne