SATURDAY, July 17 (HealthDay News) -- Athletes at high risk for anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injury can be identified through a simple, inexpensive method that can be done in a doctor's office, according a new study.

The approach combines measuring the tibia (shin bone) with a standard measuring tape, weighing the patient, and using a camcorder to record the motions of the patient's knee when landing after a jump.

The accuracy of this method was very close to that of expensive and complex laboratory-based motion analysis systems, according to the researchers.

The study was to be presented July 17 at the annual meeting of the American Orthopaedic Society for Sports Medicine in Providence, R.I.

"This method may be used as a training camp protocol in partnership with team clinicians or set up and run in the athletic training setting," study author Greg Myer, a sports biomechanist at Cincinnati Children's Hospital, said in an AOSSM news release.

"Current evidence indicates that athletes identified as high risk for ACL injury using this approach are more responsive to neuromuscular training aimed at reducing this risk factor. This tool can be used to get high-risk athletes into appropriate interventions to further reduce their potential of injury risk, which may [improve] future interventions aimed to prevent ACL injury in female athletes," Myer added.

The tool may have particular benefit for women, who are two to eight times more likely to suffer an ACL injury than men, according to the researchers. This may be due to the effects that women's hormone levels have on ligament strength and stiffness, neuromuscular control and fatigue, and lower limb biomechanics. There are also gender differences in neuromuscular control when landing jumps, researchers said: Women appear to have less hip and knee flexion or bending and land more knock kneed than men.

More information

The American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons has more about ACL injury  .

TUESDAY, July 6 (HealthDay News) -- The popular supplement glucosamine offers little or no relief for sufferers of chronic lower back pain caused by osteoarthritis, a new study finds.

The Norwegian trial seems to be another knock against glucosamine, with other recent studies showing similar results.

"The study answer the questions: 'I have suffered low back pain for a long time (more than 6 months), will a 6-month intake of glucosamine help me?'" said lead researcher Philip Wilkens, a research fellow in the orthopedic department at the University of Oslo. "And the answer according to this study is no."

On the up side, "glucosamine appears safe to use," he added. "And more research is needed to answer if glucosamine is beneficial to prevent chronic low back pain or have benefits in longer term, like 5 to 10 years."

Osteoarthritis affects more than 20 million Americans, and the number is expected to increase, the researchers note. Glucosamine is a common over-the-counter treatment for osteoarthritis, even though its use has been controversial.

For example, a University of Pittsburgh study presented at a rheumatologists' meeting in October found the supplement did not prevent loss of cartilage in osteoarthritic knees, while studies published in 2008 in Arthritis & Rheumatism and the Annals of Internal Medicine found glucosamine had little or no effect on arthritis of the knee and hips, respectively.

The new report is published in the July 7 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

For the study, Wilkens's team randomly assigned 250 patients with chronic back pain and degenerative lumbar osteoarthritis to 1,500 milligrams daily of glucosamine or an inactive placebo.

The patients' pain was measured using the Roland Morris Disability Questionnaire at 6 weeks, then again at 3, 6 and 12 months. In addition, the researchers evaluated the patients' self-reported quality of life.

At the start of the 6-month trial, patients taking glucosamine scored 9.2 on the pain scale while the patients taking placebo scored 9.7, the researchers note. At the 6-month point, both groups scored 5.0, and after one year the glucosamine group scored 4.8 while the placebo group scored 5.5, Wilkens's group found.

However, the small differences in scores at six months or one year were not statistically significant, the researchers say. Nor were minor differences in quality of life between the two groups deemed significant.

The bottom line, according to Wilkens: "People with chronic low back pain and degenerative osteoarthritis will not benefit more from glucosamine than placebo for treating their back problem."

Dr. Andrew L. Avins, a scientist in the division of research at Kaiser Permanente Northern California and the author of an accompanying journal editorial, said that, "from a clinical standpoint, the study demonstrates that glucosamine does not appear to be better than placebo for patients with chronic low back pain and spinal arthritis."

However, the study found no ill effects from taking the supplement. So, patients who take glucosamine and feel that it is helping them should be reassured that it's at least not harmful, said Avins, who is also professor of medicine, epidemiology & biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco.

"The larger implications [of this study] are that we still know very little about how to help most patients with chronic low back pain, and we need much more careful, directed research to help make progress in providing relief to patients with back pain," he added.

Even though back pain is an incredibly important public health and quality of life problem, it suffers from insufficient attention and research funding, Avins believes. "In the U.S., we spend far more on treatments of little or questionable value than we spend on research to find effective therapies; it's a poor use of scarce health-care resources," he said.

Dr. Andrew Sherman, an associate professor and vice-chair of the department of rehabilitation medicine at the University of Miami Leonard M. Miller School of Medicine, agreed that the findings should dissuade doctors from recommending glucosamine to patients with back pain.

However, "this [study] is not going to stop people from trying it," he added, and the finding does not mean that glucosamine won't work for other forms of arthritis.

More information

For more information on arthritis, visit the U.S. National Library of Medicine.

TUESDAY, June 29 (HealthDay News) -- Arthroscopic surgery to repair a torn anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) or meniscal cartilage injury in the knee does not reduce the risk of developing osteoarthritis later, a new study finds.

Researchers analyzed data from 326 patients who were examined and treated for knee injuries in 1996 and 1997. A decade after the injuries were diagnosed, localized knee osteoarthritis (OA) was evident in the patients, regardless of whether or not they'd had surgery to repair their injuries.

The findings appear online June 29 and in the August print issue of the journal Radiology.

"This study proves that meniscal and cruciate ligament lesions increase the risk of developing specific types of knee osteoarthritis. Surgical therapy does not decrease that risk," study author Dr. Kasper Huetink, a resident radiologist at Leiden University Medical Center in the Netherlands, said in a journal news release.

Further research is needed to investigate the short- and long-term effects of different types of surgical repair of ACL or meniscal cartilage injuries, Huetink noted.

More than 9 million Americans have knee OA, which typically develops over several years. Symptoms include pain, stiffness, swelling and decreased knee mobility.

More information

The American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons has more about knee OA  .