As youth sports become increasingly specialized, a family from The Woodlands is the subject of this Gina Kolata/NY Times article on one of the big risks to children of that trend — increased torn anterior cruciate ligaments (“ACL”), the main ligament that stabilizes the knee joint:

The standard and effective treatment for such an injury in adults is surgery. But the operation poses a greater risk for children and adolescents who have not finished growing because it involves drilling into a growth plate, an area of still-developing tissue at the end of the leg bone.
Although there are no complete or official numbers, orthopedists at leading medical centers estimate that several thousand children and young adolescents are getting A.C.L. tears each year, with the number being diagnosed soaring recently. Some centers that used to see only a few such cases a year are now seeing several each week.

A friend of mine and I were discussing last week how unfortunate it is that most children these days depend on their parents to organize athletic activities for them rather than simply playing sports informally with neighborhood friends. Increased specialization is the natural evolution of organized sports, which means more games, more practice and more pressure on growing muscles, joints and bones. Not a particularly healthy risk in my book.