As the primary care sports medicine doctor for the New York Liberty basketball team—and a former Division I athlete—I've seen more sports injuries than I can count. It's easy to get injured doing what we love—injury prevention, treatment, and recovery are natural parts of any athlete's journey. But even as more eyes turn to women's sports, and female athletes surge in popularity, there's still a great deal that sports medicine doctors don't know about actually treating women.
We need increased investment in women's sports science—not just to improve outcomes for elite athletes, but to improve care for women and girls across the healthcare system. Women have long been underrepresented in medical research. Before Congress mandated inclusion in the 1990s, researchers rarely included women in medical trials.
In the 1970s, the Food and Drug Administration even explicitly recommended excluding women of childbearing potential. Many—predominantly male—researchers simply considered male bodies the norm, and assumed that they could apply the results of all-male trials to women. But women are not just "tiny men." They have very different anatomies and physiologies, which in turn respond very differently to physical activity compared to men—especially as they get older.
Take a common athlete's injury: a torn anterior cruciate ligament (ACL). Women tear their ACLs at far higher rates than men—in basketball, for example, women are more than three times as likely to tear their ACL, and most of those tears occur without direct contact to the knee, from movements such as landing and pivoting. That's partly due to a simple difference in anatomy.
Women have a wider pelvis and wider hips, which can change the biomechanical loading—force and pressure—on the knee. Without specific injury prevention programs, that can increase risk of injury. Certain hormones can also affect ligament integrity and laxity.
Women also tend to rely more heavily on their quad muscles when landing from a jump, rather than distributing force through the glutes, hamstrings, and hips. That landing pattern can place greater stress on the knee and increase strain on the ACL. The ACL is one example of many.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
