Women’s soccer goal: Protect knees

Ah, soccer: charging the goal with the wind in your hair, basking in cheers as you make that game-rescuing save. But for a few, the sport has a long-term downside. Half of female soccer players who rip their knee ligaments go on in later years to develop osteoarthritis of the knee, according to Swedish scientists.

Knee surgery -- performed partly to lower this long-term risk -- appears to make little difference, according to the report, published in the October issue of Arthritis and Rheumatism, a medical journal.

The scientists studied 103 former women soccer players, average age 31, who 12 years earlier had torn an anterior cruciate ligament, which stabilizes the knee by keeping the bones from sliding backward and forward. They saw structural knee change in 82% of the 67 women who had knee radiography, and clear signs of osteoarthritis in 51%.

The popularity of women’s soccer has been rising steadily, and for unclear reasons women are more likely than men to sustain anterior cruciate injuries, said Dr. Stefan Lohmander, an orthopedist at the University of Lund in Sweden and lead author of the study. Better treatment is needed to lower the chance of long-term complications, he added.

So is better prevention, said Dr. Allan Abbott, professor of family medicine and sports medicine at USC’s Keck School of Medicine. “People do fall and twist and bang into their knees and ankles -- that’s unavoidable in any sport. But are injuries more likely on what kinds of playing fields? Are they more likely with cleats or without cleats? Are there different ways of enforcing rules that could decrease the injury rate? We really owe it to our children to better identify the kinds of activities and equipment that can protect them.”