Anterior cruciate ligament gives rotatory stability to the knee. It provides stability especially during pivoting activity like kicking a football. It ensures that excessive forward movement of the leg does not happen there by avoiding damage to the joint.

Anterior cruciate Ligament (ACL) injury is one of the most common sporting injuries especially since the last decade due to the increased sporting activities across. Anterior cruciate ligament tear occurs during hyperextension of the knee or a hyperextension along with a valgus force causes the ACL to rupture. This kind of injury is commonly seen in contact sports like football during a tackle or wrestling. Since it’s a common injury a lot of research has gone into how this injury to the ACL can be avoided. To everyone’s relief research shows that it can be avoided if certain conditioning programs can be followed for the athletes.

Acute symptoms are pain, swelling, and inability to walk. Swelling is due to acute bleeding from the injury. Major concern of ACL injury is instability of the knee joint. Clinically different maneuvers can diagnose this injury but MRI is mandatory for confirmation of the injury and its severity as well as diagnose other associated injury like meniscus, MCL or PLC injury.

Treatment of ACL is arthroscopic reconstruction with tendon graft. Grafts are harvested from hamstring tendon, quadriceps muscle or patellar tendon.