Anterior cruciate ligament tears in children and adolescents

Excerpt

During the last 50 years an enormous change of opinions about the treatment of knee injuries in children has taken place. When I was a resident in the 1950s, I was told that children never get meniscus injuries for instance. I was also told that ACL-injuries in children did not exist. Adolescents could get detachment of the anterior insertion of their ACL with a piece of bone, I was told. Intraligamentous injuries of the ACL in children were more or less unknown then. I can still remember when (with the use of an arthroscope) I was able to show my orthopaedic colleagues an intraligamentous ACL-injury in a 10-year old boy in 1973. Now we know that these injuries occur. …