Researchers look to save skiers' knees

By REBECCA BOONE | The Associated Press • Published May 10, 2008

BOISE, Idaho - Downhill skiers often lug more than skis, boots and poles to the slopes. They also bring a nagging fear of a knee injury, a trauma that has prompted some to switch to snowboarding and others to give up the sport entirely.

A handful of researchers across the country is trying to change that.

They hope to make skiing safer by analyzing ski-related knee injuries and using the information to design bindings that will sense ligament-ripping forces and release milliseconds before an injury occurs.

"There are four major ligaments of the knee and you can injure all of them in a bad ski crash," said Dr. Kevin Shea, an orthopedic surgeon with Intermountain Orthopaedics in Boise. "Right now, ski bindings protect the tibia (shin bone) at the expense of the knee. So we want to create a smarter binding that doesn't forget about the tibia but stops ignoring the knee."

Both Shea and Carl Ettlinger, a ski injury expert and president of Vermont Safety Research, are running separate research projects on the subject.

If the work being done by Shea or Ettlinger is successful, it could have a big effect.

Overall, skiing injuries have declined by about 55 percent since 1972, and injuries to the lower limbs have dropped by about 58 percent, according to numbers gathered by Ettlinger and his co-researchers. But in the two decades since 1972, serious knee sprains increased by about 268 percent, Ettlinger said. Since the mid-90s, serious knee sprain rates have dropped somewhat, but not nearly as much as injuries to other parts of the leg.

"If you look 30 or 50 years ago, most of the injuries we saw were called boot-top fractures," Shea said. "Because of the way the boots and bindings were designed, most of the force in a crash was transferred right to the top of the boot, breaking the tibia."

Shin fractures were greatly reduced thanks to research on the problem in the 1970s and 1980s, much of it by Ettlinger,

Improvements in bindings allowed a skier's boot to pull free of the ski in a crash, lessening the chance of injury. The research also led to new standards for bindings' release settings based on a skier's weight, height, age and skill.