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Gabe Schall: Doctors are seeing an uptick in ACL knee injuries in young athletes across Michigan.
WCMU's Tina Sawyer recently sat down with Stefanie Mills, one of WCMU's TV producers to learn more about this debilitating injury. Mills recently produced a TV segment of this story for WCMU's Pressing Matters. She started the discussion by explaining what the ACL affects.
Stefanie Mills: It's a band of tissue inside your knee that connects the femur thigh bone to the tibia or the shin bone to the knee joint. But as I discovered, I was hearing more stories about ACL injuries and tears, and it wasn't just boys, and it wasn't just a specific sport. It was all different sports. There is a lot of research that shows that girls are significantly more susceptible to injuries.
Tina Sawyer: In the episode of Pressing Matters, the topic was, you know, why girls? And they had brought up hormones are changing in younger people, younger women.
SM: Yeah, the incident rate, it depends on an activity. Boys versus girls, girls are actually 4 to 8 times more susceptible to ACL injuries. And again, depends on sports, but there's other factors too. And one of those factors includes monthly cycles, hormone levels. It's also about girls' knees are built different. Biological factors and physical factors, right? Girls' bone structures are not the same as their male counterparts.
TS: Why are they on the rise now as opposed to say 10 years ago? And I know that's a very broad umbrella.
SM: I think there are many reasons. What I learned by talking with Dr. Crawford and Kyle Mason is that the seasons are longer, the expectations are just more demanding overall. But seasons are stretching year-round, right? And so there's just more demands being put, especially on younger bodies that are still growing. So it's all about finding balance and also nutrition, getting enough sleep, stretching, all those things. They're pushing themselves more.
TS: The intensity is there.
SM: The athlete that was featured, her name is Grace. She's a soccer player. And through her journey, I kind of learned more and more about ACL injuries. You know, oftentimes require surgery that's going to keep you out of competition for at least a year.
TS: She was a soccer player. Now, are you seeing those tears in like basketball players as well?
SM: Absolutely. There's basketball players, there are soccer players, there are volleyball players, there are football players. It's no one. Sure, one, some sports might have higher risks of it, but it can happen to anybody. And I think the biggest part for me when I started doing the story and researching it was this information has been out there, but you don't know what you don't know until you're really, you know, until you're going through something like this, until you get injured.
TS: What are ways that people can get support, protection for these young people when they're going into a certain sport?
SM: There's no one way to prevent an injury, but here are some ways that could maybe help. One thing the doctors talked about was sports sampling. And that is basically, at younger ages, playing multiple sports, because that allows your body to use muscles in different ways, as opposed to using the same muscles over and over in the same sport. Now, not everybody may want to play extra sports, so that's where it's really important to focus on strength training, core training, that you can support your whole body.
TS: That makes sense. I understand also that another component of getting support is mentally, because they feel as though they're starting back at square one or they don't feel like a part of the team anymore. What did you learn from that?
SM: Yeah, that was a really important piece. I think mental health, especially for younger athletes, is so, so important right now. It's also important to be active, right? But then the mental health aspect, especially when you're injured, you can find yourself in really dark times. So that's where the whole teamwork comes in. And I really like how a lot of teams, they include those injured players in some capacity, right? Like from team managers maybe. So that's all really important to just feel that camaraderie with your teammates and your coaches and your family and your friends, you know, to have a good, strong, solid support system there.
TS: Stefanie Mills, thank you so much for joining us.
SM: Thank you so much for having me, Tina.
