How to get a better picture of the ACL injury problem? A call to systematically include conservatively managed patients in ACL registries.
ACL injury registries have provided substantial new knowledge to sports medicine/ sports physio. Registries aggregate a large amount of individual data, sometimes via collaboration among different institutions.2 Nevertheless, a systematic recording of ACL-injured patients is nonexistent or at its very beginnings in many countries.
Owing to the variety and available resources of different healthcare systems, organising registries on a national level is difficult. In Europe, the pioneering Scandinavian countries were followed by a private initiative from the UK, which started in 2014. Currently, efforts to set up data collection are also being made in the German-speaking countries. Registry data are helpful in at least three ways: (1) in improving treatment outcomes through feedback to the treating physicians and institutions, (2) in detecting unreliable procedures and devices and (3) in identifying outcome-associated prognostic factors. Despite this focused attention given to ACL injuries, several issues remain unsolved.