By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS @ NYTimes
Are fragile knees inherited? That intriguing question motivated a new study published earlier this month in The British Journal of Sports Medicine, during which researchers looked at one family’s propensity for shredding anterior cruciate ligaments during sports. The report was part of a much larger, ongoing study of risk factors for A.C.L. injury... ...“We thought this repeated incidence of A.C.L. tears within one family was important to look at,” said Timothy Hewett, Ph.D., the director of sports-medicine research for Ohio State University and Cincinnati Children’s Hospital and lead author of the new study. “In my lab, we have another set of twins, identical young women, who are post-docs. They both had torn their A.C.L.’s” as high-school athletes. “Their father, who is one of a set of triplets, also had torn his A.C.L.,” as had his two triplet brothers, Mr. Hewett said. “Those incidences,” together with the injuries to the fraternal twins, “made us wonder, How much does familial predisposition influence your risk for an A.C.L. tear?”...
See the whole story at: http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/29/phys-ed-are-bad-knees-in-our-ge...
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