Patellar Beats Hamstring for ACL Rebuild (MedPageToday)
This guest column is by C. David Geier Jr., MD, an orthopedic surgeon and sports medicine specialist in Charleston, S.C. He writes about sports medicine on his website and on social media.
Should an orthopedic surgeon performing ACL reconstruction on a competitive athlete use a patellar tendon or hamstring graft?
It is an important question that has been debated for years. Numerous studies, including many randomized controlled trials, have aimed to analyze differences in patient outcomes after ACL reconstructions using patellar tendon and hamstring autografts.
Now a new study in the American Journal of Sports Medicine looks at one specific component of a patient's outcome after ACL reconstruction: the risk for future revision surgery.
Though surgeons overwhelmingly used hamstring autografts, researchers found a significantly lower risk of revision surgery in patients who received patellar tendon autografts.
In addition, type of activity that the patient was performing at the time of injury mattered.
"Should a soccer or team handball player with a ruptured ACL receive a patellar tendon autograft over a hamstring autograft? In v...
