Oct 22, 2015Do Oral Contraceptives Lead to Greater ACL Risk?
A new study finds that there may be a link between ACL injuries and oral contraceptive use in female athletes. Researchers from Denmark tracked almost 4,500 subjects who had suffered ACL injuries that necessitated surgery and monitored over 8,500 age-matched controls between 2005 and 2011.
According to healio.com, the study found that there is a 0.82 relative risk rate for ACL surgery between those who used oral contraceptives and those who didn’t. In other words, researchers found that someone using oral contraceptives had 0.82 times the risk of sustaining an ACL injury that would require surgery than those who didn’t use contraceptives. There was a slight decrease in risk for women who had been taking birth control longer or shorter periods of time, compared with non-users.
“A decrease in this rate was observed in long-term oral contraceptive users (0.80) and recent users (0.81),” Christian Ingram, at healio.com, reports.
