Duke Medical Minutes are produced by local sports radio affiliates, and allow Duke specialists to give a brief snapshot into health offerings at Duke.

In this episode, Claude T. Moorman III, MD, director of Duke Sports Medicine, head team physician, and orthopaedic surgeon, answers questions about ACL tears and arthritis.

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Podcast Transcript

Announcer: We’re talking with Dr. Claude T. Moorman, director of Duke Sports Medicine, head team physician, and orthopaedic surgeon. Today we’re talking about ACL tears.

Moorman: Most commonly, the quadricep itself causes the injury and this can be in a deceleration, rapid change of position, or an unexpected change in footing.

Announcer: Where is minimally invasive surgery for ACL tears today?

Moorman: Well, we’ve learned a lot over the last five years of the importance of anatomic -- meaning natural -- positioning of the ACL grafts.

A lot of that work has been done here in our laboratory with Bill Garrett and Lou Defrate -- looking at precise femoral tunnel positioning to reproduce the patient’s normal anatomy.

We think this will improve the cartilage loading patterns and improve the likelihood that the patient will not get any arthritic change down the road.

Announcer: That research at Duke. Expand more on arthritis and ACL tears -- I guess versus where minimally invasive surgery was just a couple of years ago and where it is today.

Moorman: Well, the less trauma you have to the joint, the less likely you’re going to have a problem, and we have learned that ACL reconstruction alone does not necessarily prevent arthritis in a patient with an ACL tear.

It’s very important to get the tunnel position precise, and there’s some key tools that have been developed to do that over the last five years.