A 14-year-old gymnast with a stress fracture in her lower back. A 12-year-old who tore his ACL in a soccer game. A 16-year-old runner with a leg stress fracture. A 15-year-old who tore his meniscus playing basketball.
A single morning’s patients for Harvard’s Dr. Mininder Kocher provides a window into a troubling trend: Injuries once seen mostly in adult athletes are becoming distressingly common in young athletes–not just in high school, but in Little League and Pee Wee Football.
These aren’t simple injuries. In the past decade, “Tommy John” surgeries to repair elbows blown out playing baseball–an operation named for a Hall of Famer–have almost tripled among adolescents at a high-profile Alabama clinic, a meeting of sports medicine specialists will be told by researchers this week.
