ACL Tears Seem To Beget ACL Tears

Researchers aren’t blaming the surgeons, but they are saying that athletes who have anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) reconstruction surgery are six times more likely to suffer another ACL injury within two years than someone who has never had such an injury. HealthDay reports that researchers at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital ran the numbers in a study of 59 females and 19 males, aged 10 to 25, who underwent ACL reconstruction and returned to sports, and in a control group of 47 people who had never suffered an ACL injury. After two years, the researchers found that 23 of those in the reconstruction group and four of the people in the control group had suffered an ACL injury. Overall, 29.5 percent of athletes suffered a second ACL injury within two years of returning to sports, with 9 percent re-injuring the same knee and 20.5 percent suffering an injury to the opposite knee. Within the ACL reconstruction group, females were twice as likely as males to suffer an injury to the opposite knee. Read more from HealthDay.