Work overview

Section 01 of 07

Key Points

Situations Leading to Anterior Cruciate Ligament Injury in Sports: A Systematic Review with Meta-analysis

Patrick Mai, Steffen Willwacher, Lina Rahlf, Tim Hoenig, Luca Braun, Carlo von Diecken, Kevin Bill, Dominik Fohrmann, Tron Krosshaug, Karsten Hollander, Thomas Gronwald, and Jan Wilke · 2026

Contents

Section 01 of 07

  1. 01Key Points
  2. 02Introduction
  3. 03Methods
  4. 04Results
  5. 05Discussion
  6. 06Conclusions
  7. 07Supplementary Information
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Work overview

Section 1 of 7

Key Points

Patrick Mai, Steffen Willwacher, Lina Rahlf, Tim Hoenig, Luca Braun, Carlo von Diecken, Kevin Bill, Dominik Fohrmann, Tron Krosshaug, Karsten Hollander, Thomas Gronwald, and Jan Wilke · about 1 minutes

This systematic review with meta-analysis provides a quantitative synthesis of video-verified anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injury situations across sports (39 studies; 1551 injuries)
Across sports, the most frequently identified injury-inciting actions involved ball-related play, defensive pressing/tackling, and cutting; noncontact injuries clustered around cutting, deceleration, and landing, whereas being tackled predominated in indirect contact cases (with limited action-specific data available for direct contact injuries)
ACL injuries commonly occurred during ball possession and offensive play and were often associated with high horizontal speed, supporting mechanism-specific, sport-tailored, scenario-based prevention strategies and underscoring the need for more harmonized, injury-level reporting in future video studies