New Procedure Helps Repair Torn ACL

A new procedure to help repair a torn ACL (anterior cruciate ligament) is getting young women back to the sports they love.

According to Mark A. Slabaugh, M.D., an orthopedic sports medicine surgeon with Sports Medicine at Mercy in Baltimore, there is only a four percent chance of re-tearing the ACL using this new procedure.

Amy Sylvia is an active athlete. About a year ago, one moment during a soccer game changed everything.

“The other player came and collided with my left leg, and then, it basically made a very loud snap,” Sylvia said.

The diagnosis was every athlete’s worst nightmare: a torn ACL.

“She's very, very active, wants to go back to soccer. She said she was playing either four or five games a week. And, you know, those type of patients—because of her age, because of her sex, and also because of the desired sports that she wanted to play in the future—we said, ‘She’s a perfect candidate for this,’” Dr. Slabaugh said.

The procedure is called lateral extra-articular tenodesis (LET), and Dr. Slabaugh noted he’s performing this procedure more often.

“We take a strip of that fascia, and then we put it under one of the ligaments called the lateral collateral ligament. And then, [we] dock it into the bone, and that provides two points of fixation in order to decrease the risk of them having what’s called a pitch shift,” Dr. Slabaugh said.

With LET comes a little extra time under anesthesia and a bit of a larger incision.

“I actually put weight on it the first day I got home. So, I was only on crutches for, like, maybe two or three days, and most of the time, it was only one crutch,” Sylvia said.

Not even a year later, after putting in the work at physical therapy, Sylvia returned to playing the sport she loves.

Dr. Slabaugh explained that it’s important for young female athletes to do different activities throughout the year and change it up so that they’re less likely to cause an injury from overuse of the same body parts.

View Mercy sports medicine/orthopedic surgeon Dr. Mark Slabaugh’s interview regarding ACL surgery.