Adam E. Klein, MD - West Virginia State Medical Association

Scientific Article |Table 2. ACL Injury by Yearpossible explanation is the numberof high school ACL injuries has notincreased, but instead, more athletesare continuing participation afterinjury than in previous years. Datafrom the National Football League(NFL) combine physicals show thatthe odds of failing an examinationat the professional level due toan ACL injury has declined overtime. 14 Future research looking atthe rate of high school ACL injuriesover time would be helpful indetermining the source of a risingprevalence in college athletes.In collegiate athletes, the overallrate of ACL injury has remainedstable since 1989 1-3 but femalescontinue to show a 2- to 4- foldincrease in the incidence of ACLinjuries compared to males. 1-3,5-7,9 Inour study, football players had thehighest number of ACL injuries,but female soccer athletes had ahigher percentage of injuries perparticipant. Due to the wide variationin number of participants, directstatistical comparison between sportswas not performed in this study.There are limitations to this study.One is that the results are from oneinstitution; our data may not beindicative of an increasing prevalencein ACL injuries on a national scale.Similar studies from other institutionswould aid in confirming the resultsof this study. Another limitation isthat no documentation was madeon the physical examination form ofhow the athlete originally injured theACL. As such, we cannot determineif athletes were participating in thesame sport at the time of injury asthey desired to play in college. It isalso possible the athletes sufferedthe ACL injury during conditioningactivity that may not have beendirectly related to their specific sportactivity. Due to these limitations,the study was designed to reflectonly the overall prevalence of ACLinjuries at presentation to collegiateathletics. The data was also obtainedin part from athlete recall, althoughthe impact of this potential errorshould have been minimized bythe fact that all athletes underwenta physical examination of the kneeby an experienced operator whoshould have been able to detect anunreported ACL deficit knee and/or observed the presence of a scarfrom a ligament reconstruction.The results of this study show anincreasing prevalence of ACL injuriesin a specific collegiate population.If these findings are reflective of ageneral trend in collegiate athletics,it lends support to initiatingprevention strategies in high schoolathletes since such programs canreduce the rate of ACL injuries,particularly in female athletes. 1510 West Virginia Medical Journal