Our group was recently awarded a 5-year, $3.2 million grant from the NIH / NIAMS (National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Disease) to build on our previous work studying pediatric anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injury treatment. ACL injuries continue to be a significant problem in the US, affecting more than 250,000 people annually, and the fastest rising injury rates are in children and adolescents with significant growth still remaining. Reconstruction of a completely torn ACL (ACLR) is becoming increasingly popular to treat these injuries in children of all ages to restore knee stability and permit the return to sports while limiting secondary injuries to other structures. Despite our awareness that failure rates after ACLR for pediatric patients are higher than they are for adults, comparisons of long-term joint degeneration between different surgical techniques have not been done. The goal of this project is to determine how ACL reconstruction technique can influence long-term graft remodeling and joint degeneration in the pediatric knee joint. Such information will allow us to provide better guidance for pediatric patients dealing with complete or partial ACL injuries.
Collaborators on this project include Drs. Lauren Schnabel and Logan Opperman at NC State, along with Dr. Jeffrey Spang at UNC-Chapel Hill.
You can read a summary of the project here.
Preliminary data for this proposal was collected with support from the UNC Thurston Arthritis Research Center, UNC NC TraCS Institute, and the NC State Office of Research and Innovation