33. LIVE from AAOS with Dr. Brian Waterman: Should Offensive Linemen Use Prophylactic Knee Braces?
We’re coming to you live from the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons annual meeting in Las Vegas, our largest orthopaedic conference. This year, over 20,000 orthopedic professionals gathered at the AAOS meeting to take part. The educational program is comprised of instructional course lectures, video theater, live surgeries, podium presentations and research posters.
Over the next several episodes we’re going to be reviewing five sports medicine posters that were presented at the AAOS meeting. On this podcast we try to review the most updated literature on different sports medicine topics. So, reviewing some of the posters that were just presented at AAOS is particularly exciting for us because this is very new data. So new that most of this data has not even been published yet.
We’re joined by Dr. Brian Waterman to get his take on these poster presentations.
Dr. Brian Waterman is a board-certified, orthopedic surgeon specializing in adult and pediatric sports medicine, cartilage restoration and joint preservation, complex knee surgery and shoulder and elbow care. He is the Chief of sports medicine at Wake Forest University and the Director of their sports medicine fellowship program. Dr. Waterman completed his orthopedic surgery residency at William Beaumont Army Medical Center and served 13 years in the U.S. Army, earning multiple honors including the Meritorious Service Medal and Army Commendation Medal.
Dr. Waterman then went on to complete a sports medicine fellowship at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago. He is the team physician for Wake Forest University, the Winston-Salem Dash, U.S. Ski and Snowboard and several local high schools.
Dr. Waterman is an associate editor for the Arthroscopy Journal and is on the Board of Directors for Arthroscopy Association of North America. Given his extensive experience with orthopedic research, Dr. Waterman led the sports medicine poster tour at AAOS this year, so we’re looking forward to getting his unique perspective on these poster presentations.
Featured Poster:
Should NFL Offensive Linemen Use Prophylactic Knee Braces? A Retrospective Analysis of Usage Trends, Player Performance, and Major Knee Injury. Offensive linemen in American football are prone to high-energy valgus forces to the knee and associated ligament injuries.
Use of prophylactic knee braces has been hypothesized to protect against these injuries but the evidence backing this up has been inconclusive at best.
Robert Gallo and his colleagues at Penn State performed a prospective cohort study from 2014 to 2020, comparing NFL offensive lineman who chose to wear prophylactic knee braces to lineman who did not. They evaluated injury rates as well as performance metrics. Interestingly, the authors reported that from 2014 to 2020, the prevalence of knee brace usage declined linearly, from 16% in 2014 to 5% in 2020.
