If you have a functional partial tear of your ACL, that means that you have torn a certain portion of your ACL fibers, however, you are still able to participate in sports without the feeling of the knee giving way or being unstable. If you possess a nonfunctional partial tear of your ACL, that means that you have torn enough of your ACL fibers that your knee no longer feel stable. That means that you are at risk of further injury if you return to your prior level of sports participation. Every time your knee buckles or gives way you run the risk of tearing other structures within the knee, such as the
medial or lateral meniscus. If you sustain tears of either the medial or lateral meniscus, which are the shock absorbers with within the knee, then you are at risk of developing osteoarthritis. You therefore want to eliminate or minimize the risk of buckling, instability or giving way and therefore a patient who presents with a partial ACL tear, who complains of instability, will likely present as an appropriate candidate to consider an
ACL reconstruction or possibly an
ACL augmentation.
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In an ACL augmentation, you have only sustained a partial tear. That means that a portion of your ACL remains intact and should be normal. Many competent sports medicine orthopedic surgeons are capable of reconstructing
only the torn portion of the ligament, leaving the normal portion alone. There are many advantages to an ACL partial tear augmentation over a full ACL reconstruction. While the discomfort, and the nature of the surgery is virtually identical – – – it is far more likely that someone who undergoes an augmentation will have a much more natural feeling knee when all is said and done. The reason for that is because the normal ACL has certain nerves within it. Those nerve fibers give the brain certain feedback as to the position of the knee joint. It turns out that those nerve fibers are quite important. If we preserve the intact portion of your ACL, then we are preserving those nerve fibers and hopefully preserving the integrity of your knee in the long run.