Lower Extremity Movement Variability In Children After Pediatric Anterior Cruciate Ligament Reconstruction

Download or read book Lower Extremity Movement Variability in Children After Pediatric Anterior Cruciate Ligament Reconstruction written by Karen Thatcher VanEtten and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite the advent of surgical techniques to respect open growth plates, outcomes following physeal-sparing anterior cruciate ligament reconstruction (pACLR) in children are suboptimal, with high 2nd injury and low return to sport rates. Researchers have applied the Dynamic Systems Theory (DST) to the skeletally mature population following traditional anterior cruciate ligament reconstruction (ACLR) in aims of better understanding lower extremity coordination and movement variability to help elucidate the suboptimal outcomes and inform rehabilitation decision-making in this patient population. This approach has yet to be applied to the pediatric population following pACLR. Thus, the purpose of this work was to examine lower extremity coordination and movement variability in children following pACLR, and to compare that to adolescents following traditional ACLR as well as adolescent healthy controls. We hypothesized that during a single-leg landing task, children following pACLR would demonstrate 1) increased movement variability on their surgical limb as compared to the surgical limb of adolescents following ACLR and to the preferred limb of adolescent healthy controls, and 2) increased movement variability on their non-surgical limb as compared to the non-surgical limb of adolescents following ACLR and to the non-preferred limb of adolescent healthy controls. Participants included 11 skeletally immature children following primary, unilateral pACLR using a hamstring autograft (11.54±1.69 years, 9 male/2 female), 20 adolescents following primary, unilateral, transphyseal ACLR (16.99±0.60 years, 6 male/14 female), and 20 adolescent healthy controls (16.17±0.57 years, 2 males/18 females). Lower extremity kinematics from three trials on each limb of a single-leg landing task from a 31 cm box onto a force plate were captured and the landing phase was analyzed using a 3D motion analysis system. A vector coding technique was utilized to calculate lower extremity joint coupling angles for each trial. Movement variability was quantified using the root mean square of the circular standard deviation of coupling angles across each participant’s 3 trials. Lower extremity movement variability for the involved and uninvolved limbs, respectively, was compared between groups with Kruskal-Wallis test, with significance set a priori at p