Pakistan The Nation With Passion To Sports And Common Knee Injuries In Sports Players
Article By :
Dr. Umer Butt MD, MRCS (UK), FRCS T&O (UK).
Senior Consultant Orthopaedic Surgeon.
Knee and Shoulder Sports Injuries and Arthroplasty Specialist.
Like any other developed countries, Pakistan is a country of young population with a great passion for sports.
Cricket, football, and hockey are played around the streets and so does the issues with sports injuries especially around the knee joint.
In the western world, the availability of proper grounds organized health care system, well maintained primary health care plus sports teachers training kids at a school level relating to sports injuries prevention allows the younger generation to stay fit and intervene early if required.
On the other hand when our young sportsmen Injure the knee joint they continue to put more stress on the joint leading to devastating consequences
One of the commonest knee ligament injury encountered is Anterior Cruciate Ligament. It’s a rope-like a ligament that attaches shin bone to thigh bone and prevents the knee from excessive anterior dislocation plus allows rotational stability to the knee joint.
The commonest mechanism of injury is a noncontact pivoting load to the knee joint during high-level sports like football, tennis, hockey, etc.
The signs and symptoms of an anterior cruciate ligament injury is a Loud pop, feeling As if knee the joint dislocated and reduced followed by increase swelling that settles down with icing and rests in a few weeks.
The issue starts when a young sportsman resumes contact sports without proper consultation from the specialist and physiotherapist to pick the ligament injury so he can undergo proper treatment.
The fact that the anterior cruciate ligament is no more and when u continue to play on an unstable knee that will pivot and slightly dislocated every time one jumps or tackle leads to damage to the structures inside the knee joint like cartilage, meniscus, and wasting of quads muscles and this lead to wear and tear of the knee joint which is called osteoarthritis.
Advances in technologies have excelled to the level that now in developed countries anterior cruciate ligament is not just simply reconstructed meaning, taking patient own tendon and passing the tendon graft from the bone tunnels and recreating similar anatomy as before.
The success of arthroscopic anterior cruciate ligament reconstruction if done by an experienced sports surgeon is up-to 98% Majority of players can go back to pre-injury level of sports the following surgery around 12 months down the line.
Sadly in Pakistan, we don’t have the data to measure success, secondly, till date, 95% of anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) surgery is still operated by opening up the knee joint and use of metallic screws that have almost abandoned among sports surgeons in Europe and USA more than 2 decades ago.
The issue with open ACL reconstructions are many ranging from pain, longer recovery, stiffness, more risk of infection and if the surgery fails, revising open ACL reconstruction is more challenging then arthroscopic.
In my practice I offer patient not only ACL reconstruction that will be done all via arthroscopy , which is keyhole surgery without opening up the knee joint but also very biological enhanced , the aim is to save all the ACL tissue that is in the knee joint, quick surgery, less tissue damage and accelerating healing of the ACL graft with stem cell that is injected at the same time as surgery is done . The benefit is enhanced recovery and quicker and faster reduction is swelling.
In my practice all my patients will have post-injury MRI scan, physiotherapy training prior to offering them surgery to strengthen the muscles and after surgery accelerated physiotherapy focused on ACL.
The surgical time is under 40 Minutes and patients can go home the same or next day.
The patient normally starts physiotherapy in a few hours following surgery and can walk without any support in 12 days.
The knee is a complex joint, every part of the knee joint is different from each other from the shape, size, and function, but they all work together in harmony to allow normal knee biomechanical function.
Saving the knee joint is important to prevent long term disability and cost to the society
