摘要：Knee sleeves or braces represent auxiliary tools that have repeatedly been used by athletes, in an attempt to increase knee stability and, thus, reduce the risk of (recurrent) ligamentous injuries. Since ACL injuries typically occur in situations involving either torsion or hyperextension of the knee, it has been speculated that braces might protect the ACL by countering excessive anterior translation of the tibia with respect to the femur (Beynnon et al., 1997). However, the preponderance of in vivo studies to test this hypothesis was performed in cohorts of patients suffering from existent ligamentous (Branch et al., 1988; Colville et al., 1986) or other knee injury (Beynnon et al., 1997; Fleming et al., 2000). This complicates the extrapolation of results to healthy subjects. Further, the braces used in these studies were mostly rigid constructs that consisted of either uni- or bilateral hinged bars (Rishiraj et al., 2009). Such braces might hinder performance (Veldhuizen et al., 1991) and would be rejected by the vast majority of healthy athletes. For these reasons, we would like to use this letter to the editor to report the results of our experiments investigating whether a relatively light elastic knee sleeve would limit the degree of anterior tibial translation in computerized arthrometry tests as performed in a sample of non-injured subjects.
