ACL tears and the menstrual cycle: Is there a connection?

This fall, nearly 200 female college athletes from Pace University will help Amy West, MD, try to answer a question that has troubled her since her college sports career: What effect, if any, does the menstrual cycle have on sports-related injuries? In a first-of-its-kind study, Dr. West, a physical medicine and rehabilitation specialist at Northwell Health, will be particularly interested in ACL injuries; compared to men, women have three to six times greater risk of an injury to this knee ligament. On this episode, Dr. West discusses her study, the dire need to improve injury prevention in female athletes across the board, and what women can do now to reduce their risk of injury. 

Podcast transcript

This is Part 2 of our series focusing on women’s health. All year long, we’ll be covering topics affecting women, from issues around ovarian and lung cancer to federal funding for women’s health research, to the lack of gender-specific studies, which we covered in Ep. 1, featuring two prominent leaders in women's health, Stacey Rosen, MD, and Nisha Parikh, MD. You can listen to that episode in our feed.