Repair ACL Injuries in Young Athletes Quickly
It's been shown that the girls have somewhere between a two- and eight-fold higher risk of sustaining ACL injuries compared to males," Ganley said.
An ACL tear can lead to a cascade of other problems, including ligament tears around the knee.
In the past, surgeons chose to wait to repair ACL injuries if athletes were under age 15. The theory was that they should wait a few years until a child's bones had more time to grow. "We'd think, we don't want to drill through the [bone] growth plates, it's too risky," Micheli said.
But some orthopedists challenged the prevailing assumptions and performed such surgery on children aged 14 and under. The new study suggests they made the right call.
Ganley and colleagues examined the records of almost 70 patients who underwent ACL reconstruction surgery between 1991 and 2005. All were aged 14 and under.
Twenty-nine of the patients were treated more than three months after their injury, while the rest were operated on right after the damage occurred.
The study authors reported their findings Monday at the American Orthopaedic Society for Sports Medicine's annual meeting in Keystone, Colo.
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