Surgery vs. Rehabilitation for Anterior Cruciate Ligament Injuries

Surgery vs. Rehabilitation for Anterior Cruciate Ligament Injuries

Anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injuries are one of the most common and serious knee injuries. There is an ongoing clinical and scientific debate that certainly matters to our patients – whether the management of these injuries should primarily consist of surgery or rehabilitation? Currently, the quality of evidence from existing randomized trials (RCTs) cannot provide an answer as to which approach is superior.  From a patient’s perspective, the experience with these two interventions can be drastically different, so it would be nice to be able to offer some evidence-based advice!

The aim of this living systematic review is to examine the comparative effectiveness of surgery versus rehabilitation treatments after an ACL rupture. A living systematic review, as defined by the Cochrane Library, is a systematic review which is continually updated, incorporating relevant new evidence as it becomes available. This approach is useful for this topic as it is expected that the evidence base for the outcomes assessed in this review will evolve over time. The authors plan to update this review every year for a minimum of 6 years.

RESEARCH REVIEW: “Surgery vs. Rehabilitation for Anterior Cruciate Ligament Injuries”

This paper was published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine (2022) and this Review is posted in Knee, Surgery and the 2023 Archive.