Maybe it's that doctors just missed these injuries before, but new techniques and tools make it easier to spot torn anterior cruciate ligament (ACL).
It may also be that kids are wearing their knees out at an earlier age by playing multiple sports at a competitive level.
The New York Times explores the story:
In the old days, said
Dr. Theodore J. Ganley, director of sports
medicine at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and a spokesman for
the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons, a child would develop a
“trick knee” that made sports difficult, but the real reason was not
understood. And most doctors, thinking children did not get A.C.L.
tears, did not suspect the real reason.
Now that almost every child with a hurt knee gets a magnetic resonance imaging, doctors are finding the ligament tears on a regular basis.
The
other reason for the reported surge in A.C.L. tears, doctors speculate,
is that the best athletes are more or less constantly at risk. They
play year-round and on multiple teams with frequent games, in which the
risk of injury is higher than in practice because of the intensity of
play.
“The kids are playing at really highly competitive levels
at earlier and earlier ages,” said Dr. Mininder S. Kocher, the
associate director of the division of sports medicine at Children’s
Hospital in Boston.
Whatever the reason, the increase in diagnoses has created a new problem: what to do about the injury.
