ACL Surgery Cuts Elite Performers’ Ranks

The good news is that most athletes who undergo anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) reconstruction surgery return to some form of sport. The bad news is that only 55% will return to competitive level sports, according to Kathryn Doyle, writing in Reuters Health about a study conducted in Australia.

Ph.D. student Clare L. Ardern of the School of Allied Health in the Faculty of Health Sciences at La Trobe University in Bundoora, Australia, reviewed 69 articles on ACL surgery and return to play published between April 2010 and November 2013. The papers covered 7, 556 patients, 81% of whom returned to some sport after their injury. However, only 65% were able to return to their pre-injury level. And fewer were able to be competitive in their sport.

The researchers found that younger players and men were more likely to get back into their sport than were older players and women. Also elite level sportsmen were about six times more likely to fight their way back to a competitive level than were non-elite athletes.

Doyle quoted the lead author Ardern as saying, “I think we used to presume that everyone returned to their sport after surgery, especially since one of the main reasons why people have surgery is because they want to return to sport. But clearly these results show that this is not the case.”

Ardern told Reuters Health in an email message, “Some people may have changed the sport they played, but we were not able to measure this in our study.”