FORCES IN LIGAMENTS ABOUT THE NORMAL AND REPAIRED KNEE.

The goal of the study was to measure how forces are distributed among knee ligaments and how this distribution changes with injury and surgical repair. It is not known how joint loads are shared between ligaments and muscle during function. It is assumed that ligaments carry load primarily during extremes of motion and under loads too rapid to allow muscle contraction. In these cases, muscle loading would be minimal and the ligaments would carry most joint load. This is the loading regime of interest in this study. Tests were performed on fresh cadaver knee joints. Buckle force transducers are devices that can provide quantitative measure of the complex ligamentous load distributions in the human knee. There are limitations with the technique that must be appreciated, but with it, information not available by other means can be obtained. The extreme complexity of load carrying function has become evident from results so far, as well as the poor replication of normal ligament substitute. Refs.