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Smith, Helen C.

Center for Clinical and Translational Science

2011

M.S.

Background: Anterior Cruciate Ligament (ACL) injuries are immediately disabling, costly, take a significant amount of time to rehabilitate and are associated with increased risk of developing post-traumatic osteoarthritis of the knee. Specific multi-planar movement patterns of the lower extremity have been shown to be associated with an increased risk of suffering non-contact ACL injuries, and the Landing Error Scoring System (LESS) has been developed as a tool that can be applied to identify individuals who display at-risk movement patterns. Hypothesis: An increase of the LESS is associated with increased risk of non-contact ACL injury. Study Design: Nested Case-Control Study.
Methods: Over a two-year time interval, 5047 high school and college athletes performed pre-season drop-vertical-jump (nVJ) tasks that were recorded using commercial video cameras. All athletes were followed for ACL injury during their sport season and video data from injured subjects and matched controls were then assessed with the LESS. Conditional logistic regression analyses to examine the association between LESS score and ACL injury risk in all subjects, as well as subgroups of female, male, high school, and college athletes.
Results: There was no relationship between the risk of ACL injury and LESS score, whether measured as continuous or a categorical variable. ThIS was the case for all subjects combined (OR = 1.04 per unit increased in LESS score; 95% CI=O.80-1.35) as well as within each subgroup. Conclusion: The LESS was not predictive of non-contact ACL injury in our group of injured cases and matched controls. Keywords: knee kinematics; ACL injury; injury risk; jump-landing.