Predicting versus Assessing Injury Risk

📝 Weekly paper summary

Measurement of movement patterns to enhance ACL injury prevention – A dead end? (Mok et al., 2016)

Category

Personal Opinion

Context

Since anterior-cruciate ligament (ACL) injuries are so prevalent in sport, researchers have explored ways to predict and prevent these injuries. For example, Hewett et al.'s prospective study from 2005 set the stage for people trying to predict who will and won't injure their ACL based on how athletes move during a drop vertical jump. Since then, various other studies have questioned whether we can predict injuries at all based on how people move (e.g., Krosshaug et al., 2016; Nilstad et al., 2021; Mørtvedt et al., 2021, to name a few). These findings have resulted in researchers and practitioners questioning whether there is a biomechanical basis for evaluating how to prevent ACL injuries. However, many people (mainly on social media, which carries more relevance than we sometimes like to admit) have conflated the poor predictive capacity of movement screens with identifying risky movement behaviours that can inform training. The former relies mainly on sophisticated statistical and dynamical systems techniques. In contrast, the latter depends on assessing, designing, evaluating, and progressing training programs to build more robust humans. The purpose of this paper was to provide a much more encompassing perspective about how practitioners can use movement assessments to inform future training objectives instead of predict injuries (i.e., the authors don't think the measurement of movement patterns to enhance ACL injury prevention is a dead-end 😊).

🧠 Fun fact of the week

I don't know how "fun" this fact is, but a 2018 paper from the National Academy of Science provided a distribution of the biomass on earth:

Take in that the biomass of bacteria is 35x that of all the animals on earth!!!! I figured animals were a relatively small proportion, but I didn't think it was that small!

🎙 Podcast recommendation

🗣 Quote of the week

I suggest reading the entire essay "The Dream of Ambition" by David Whyte (link here), but here's one of my favourite lines from it:

"The ease of having an ambition is that it can be explained to others; the very disease of ambition is that it can be so easily explained to others. What is worthy of a life’s dedication does not want to be known by us in ways that diminish its actual sense of presence."

- David Whyte