Note: To access the supplementary tables accompanying this report, visit the December issue of Arthroscopy at www.arthroscopyjournal.org.
Arthroscopy: The Journal of Arthroscopic & Related Surgery
Original ArticleA Meta-analysis of the Incidence of Anterior Cruciate Ligament Tears as a Function of Gender, Sport, and a Knee Injury–Reduction Regimen
Section snippets
Methods
A PubMed computerized literature search was performed to identify all English-language peer-reviewed research articles dealing with the incidence of ACL tears. A number of indexing terms were used to achieve this goal. The exact phrase “anterior cruciate ligament” with either the keyword “incidence” or “rate” was used initially. Each individual sport with the phrase “anterior cruciate ligament” was also indexed. We found 793 articles. Abstracts were then reviewed of each of these to identify
Results
In this section the sports are listed in descending order based on the number of exposures for each sport from the studies available.
Discussion
This is the only study to our knowledge that evaluates the overall relative risks of ACL tears as a function of sport, gender, and injury-reduction training. It is also the only study to use meta-analytic methods to arrive at these conclusions for all three parameters. The data analysis provides a number of interesting observations.
Before these observations are discussed, it should be pointed out that there is great variation in the number of exposures among the available studies. The largest
Conclusions
Female subjects had a roughly 3 times higher incidence of ACL tears in soccer and basketball than male subjects. Injury-reduction programs were effective for soccer but not basketball. Recreational Alpine skiers had the highest incidences of ACL tear, whereas expert Alpine skiers had the lowest incidences. Volleyball may in fact be a low-risk sport rather than a high-risk sport. Alpine skiers and lacrosse players had no gender difference for ACL tear rate. Year-round female soccer and
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Cited by (0)
The authors report no conflict of interest.