More women and girls are playing sports than ever before. The spectacular performance of women in the Olympics, along with the increase in the popularity of women's professional sports, have had a profound influence on little girls.
The speed, power, and intensity displayed by female athletes have dramatically increased over the past decade. Such more aggressive style of play has led, predictably, to an increase in musculoskeletal injuries. One of the more common is a sprain or rupture of the anterior cruciate ligament (ACL).
According to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, soccer players sustained more than 81,600 knee injuries in 1998, with players suffering an additional 225,800 knee injuries in basketball.
A 1995 article in the American Journal of Sports Medicine found that NCAA women's basketball players were four times more likely to tear their ACLs than their male counterparts. The same study found that women suffered twice as many ACL injuries in NCAA soccer as men.
In addition to the significant pain and suffering experienced by these female athletes, the financial cost is enormous. One study found that it cost $44 million to reconstruct and rehabilitate the 2,200 ACL injuries suffered by female collegiate athletes each year.Why women and girls are more prone to ACL injuries than men and boys defies easy explanation is also likely due to a number of anatomical and hormonal differences between men and women:
Several studies demonstrate that the rate of ACL injury among women can be significantly reduced by proper training and conditioning.
According to Dr. Thomas Haverbush, a Michigan orthopedic surgeon, a training program developed at the University of Vermont Medical School designed to prevent ACL injuries in skiers led to a 69% decrease in the number of knee injuries among ski patrol personnel and instructors who received the training compared with those who did not.
In the same article, Dr. Haverbush reported that a six week training program in Cincinnati in which athletes were trained to rely more on hamstring muscles than quadriceps in order to protect the knee could reduce the ratio of knee ligament injuries in female athletes as compared to men from five times higher to only one or two times higher.
Most recently, a study [1] reported in the American Journal of Sports Medicine suggests that the ACL injury rate for female athletes, particularly non-contact ACL injuries, can be significantly reduced if the athlete follows a specific exercise program called the Prevent Injury and Enhance Performance (PEP) [2] program before practices and games.
Designed in 1999 by a team of experts at the non-profit Santa Monica Orthopedic and Sports Medicine Research Foundation [3], the PEP program consists of a series of 19 warm-up, stretching, strengthening, plyometric, and sport-specific agility exercises that can be completed in less than 30 minutes without any specialized equipment.
The studies identify four ways to reduce the risk of ACL injury:
Revised August 8, 2011
Links:
[1] https://mail.momsteam.com/node/2481
[2] http://www.aclprevent.com/PEPExercises.pdf
[3] http://www.aclprevent.com/index.htm
[4] https://mail.momsteam.com/health-safety/PEP-exercise-program-reduces-acl-injuries-in-female-soccer-players
[5] https://mail.momsteam.com/health-safety/acl-reconstructive-surgery-return-to-play-not-guaranteed
[6] https://mail.momsteam.com/health-safety/sports-injuries-youth-sports-parents-need-to-hear-the-truth
[7] https://mail.momsteam.com/anterior-cruciate-ligament/female-soccer-players-in-neuromuscular-training-program-cut-ACL-injury-risk-two-thirds
[8] https://mail.momsteam.com/health-safety/neuromuscular-training-reduces-acl-injury-risk-by-half-study
[9] https://mail.momsteam.com/health-safety/warm-up-program-reduces-female-acl-injury-risk