Abstract
The occurrence of osteoarthritis (OA) is often thought of as a near-inevitable long-term consequence of ACL injury, with prevalences of 50–80 % reported a decade after the initial trauma [18, 36]. In this view, ACL tears are often quoted as being responsible for a large percentage of the “young patients with old knees,” [18, 37] irrespective of the treatment method. Although surgical ACL reconstruction using tendon grafts has become the current standard of care to treat the functionally unstable ACL-deficient knee [36], controversy remains to exist regarding the effect of ACL reconstruction on the development of knee OA in this generally young population. Current literature contains a number of reports suggesting that the prevalence of OA remains unchanged whether or not the ACL is surgically reconstructed [14, 19], but Daniel et al. [4] even detected an increased incidence of OA in the ACL-reconstructed group. On the other end of the spectrum, some authors seem to maintain excellent results a decade after ACL reconstruction, with reported OA prevalences of 2–3 % [14, 29].
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Claes, S., Verdonk, R., Bellemans, J., Verdonk, P.C. (2014). Long-Term Outcome of ACL Reconstruction. In: Siebold, R., Dejour, D., Zaffagnini, S. (eds) Anterior Cruciate Ligament Reconstruction. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-45349-6_27
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