Hello everyone. My name is Jonathan Dahlman. I am a third year medical student at the University of Kansas School of Medicine. Today I will be talking about lower extremity return to sport testing. My team and I have no conflict of interest for the presented project. I love this cartoon because it secretly highlights how common lower extremity injuries are. Lower extremity injuries account for an enormous portion of sports medicine cases in the United States each year. Specifically, ACL injuries alone account for greater than 50% of all knee injuries affecting over 200,000 people per year in the United States. Unfortunately, even after a lengthy recovery process, athletes who recover from injury are at an increased risk for subsequent injuries. This could be complicated by the lack of a standardized criteria for return to sport testing to safely guide the return of athletes to play after a lower extremity injury or the lack of standardized definition of the term return to sport. With this said, the purpose of the systematic review is to review current literature for joint specific and global lower extremity testing to determine the most valid functional tests that can be utilized to prevent re-injury as athletes return to sport. This study was conducted in accordance with PRISMA, Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis Guidelines. A manual study was performed using the incorporated search bases found on the left, and a total of 6,650 articles were originally identified through the initial search. 65 of the studies met all inclusion criteria and were included in the systematic review. An increasing emphasis has been placed on a patient-reported outcomes and overall psychological readiness to return to sport in recent studies for ACL reconstruction population as seen by its high incidence in reviewed articles. As shown here, the patient-reported outcomes varied quite broadly. Similarly, the incidence of functional tests in reviewed articles varied in a similar fashion with large variation in the type of functional tests utilized in a study's return to sport analysis. Ultimately, the systematic review showed no single test should be used in isolation to depict the functional status of an athlete prior to returning to sport. The research suggests that a battery of tests looking at multiple facets of strength, neuromuscular control, agility, power, and landing biomechanics are all important factors. Furthermore, for functional testing purposes, return to sport testing or return to sport functional testing would be more appropriately defined as reaching a functional level of performance that allows athletes to return to full participation in their sport while minimizing the risk of repeat injury. Altogether, more research is clearly required to identify the most valid functional test batteries for joint-specific return to sport lower extremity testing. Even with the enormous amount of literature that exists regarding ACL injuries and testing, there is no standardized criterion for return to sport clearance. As seen in this review, the research available for the hip and ankle return to sport is severely lacking. We hope that the suggested test batteries from this review can serve as a framework for research for research and validation for joint-specific return to sport functional testing. I've attached my references here and I would like to thank my outstanding team for all the time and effort that they put into this project as well as everyone who chose to listen to this presentation. If you have any questions, please contact myself, Jonathan Dahlman, at jdahlman at kumc.edu. Thank you.

lower extremity return to sport testing

ACL injuries

subsequent injuries

functional tests

joint-specific return to sport testing