Personal Injury Law

The Dangers of ACL Tears to Female Athletes and to Children

There are an increasing number of girls playing sports, such as soccer and basketball, but with this growing statistic comes an increase in the number of girls and young women sustaining sports related injuries such as anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) knee tears. Studies conclude that in sports such as soccer, basketball and gymnastics, girl athletes rupture their ACL at a rate of five times that of male athletes.  This orthopedic injury is very debilitating and can disrupt one’s every day life in the short-term and has serious long term consequences as well.

Doctors used to think that tears of the ACL almost never occurred in children. With children, the standard and effective surgery for such an injury in adults poses a greater risk for children and adolescents who have not finished growing because it involves drilling into a growth plate, an area of still-developing tissue at the end of the leg bone. Doctors often suggest delaying surgery until the child finishes growing and instead putting a brace on the injured knee and limiting a child?s activities. Those surgeons who do operate are developing new and technically demanding methods to repair ACL tears in children, drilling holes to create little tunnels in bone that is already finished growing and threading tendons around the growth plate. But the tendons are not anchored where they would normally be and the long-term effects of the operation are not known.

The ACL is a small, rubber-band-like fiber, that attaches to the femur in the upper leg and the tibia in the lower leg and stabilizes the knee. After the ACL tears from the femur, it turns into a viscous liquid. The ligament cannot be repaired; the ligament has to be replaced with a graft, which is normally created by the surgeon by using a slice of the patellar tendon below the kneecap.  Normally two surgical procedures are involved. 

There is a lot of enigma surrounding the ACL and how injuries to the same occur.  The most common cause of ACL injuries is twisting and jumping, such as a child running and stepping in a hole, falling off a bicycle, or by coming down from a rebound in basketball or by accelerating and decelerating. Often injury results without any warning and  there is uncertainty as to what specifically caused the tears.  There is a need to better understand  this injury to prevent the situation from getting worse as more girls begin to play sports and there is greater intensity level to the games.

ACL injury prevention programs have been instituted to try to ameliorate this situation. It is focused on biomechanics, which is the way that athletes move.  The results demonstrated that those students who performed PEP exercises, which included a warm up of stretching, strengthening and balancing exercises prior to their soccer games had a 74 percent reduction in ACL tears, compared to those players that only did basic warm-up exercises.  These studies will hopefully prevent future injuries but many are skeptical of the results.

The injuries to women athletes is part of a national trend in the wake of Title IX and the explosion of sports participation among girls and young women. ACL tears are not the only type of injury that girls seem more prone to than boys. A study last year by researchers at Ohio State University and Nationwide Children?s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, reported that high-school girls who play basketball suffer concussions at three times the rate of boys, and that the rate for high-school girls who play soccer is about 1.5 times the rate for boys.

Full post as published by Legal Blog on May 26, 2008 (boomark / email).