Last month, surgeons in Belgium announced the discovery of a new knee ligament. They are calling it the anterolateral ligament (ALL), and it is located on the anterior (front) and lateral (outside) part of the knee. A French doctor in 1879 was the first to propose that there might be an additional ligament in the knee. As you can see in the picture above, the ALL ligament starts in the same place as the LCL (lateral collateral ligament) on the lateral side of the femur, but it then runs more anteriorly and attaches to the tibia, where the LCL attaches to the fibula. There are some questions surrounding the discovery, mainly, why did it take so long for this ligament to be found, and what does the ligament do? Some people are even skeptical of the existence of the ligament. I'll write again next week about my opinion of the ligament and what function it might serve. This is a potentially big finding that may have implications for the future of knee surgery.
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