New knee ligament

Doctors have discovered a new knee ligament, the anterolateral ligament. It doesn't seem possible that with years of medical research and millions of cadavers studied and knee surgeries performed that it would be possible to discover a new knee ligament, but there you go.

Whether a similar process occurs in living people who injure and don’t treat an A.L.L. — because they don’t know they have one — is unknown, Dr. Claes said, but is potentially the weightiest question raised by this new research. “We think that it’s quite likely many people who tear an A.C.L. also tear an A.L.L,” he said, and that lingering injury or weakness in this overlooked ligament could leave joints unstable.

But at the moment, that possibility is speculative, although Dr. Claes said that he and his colleagues had re-examined scans of some of the knees that they had operated on to repair A.C.L. injuries and identified concomitant A.L.L. tears in many of them.

He and his colleagues have begun planning and practicing surgical procedures for treating A.L.L. tears, but at the moment, so much remains unknown about the ligament, including whether it can heal without surgery.

I tore my ACL, MCL, and meniscus in one basketball incident, and now I'm wondering if I still have an ALL or if it's just dangling there. Someone should make sure Derrick Rose's ALL is in good shape.