Knee injury interventional clinical trials: Examination of sports-related knee injury interventions from current clinical trials

Background: Every clinical trial has to be registered at ClinicalTrials.gov, which has enabled evaluations of current and discontinued clinical trials in all areas of expertise. Knee injuries are common in all levels of sport and it is becoming increasingly more important to prevent these at a younger age so they do not affect the person later in life. The purpose of this study was to create a summary of the knee injury interventional clinical trial portfolio.

Methods: All interventional trials registered at ClinicalTrials.gov from October 2021 until now (January 2025) were included. Intervention type, enrollment population, trial phase, location, and injury type were described.

Results: During this time there were 161 interventional knee injury trials active or completed. The most common intervention type was “Other” (24.2%) which included rehabilitation exercises and new diagnostic tests followed by procedures (23.0%). The majority of trials were adult only enrollment compared to only 3 that were pediatric enrollment only. An overwhelming majority did not provide a current phase, however of those that did, the most common was Phase IV. North America (42.1%) was home to the majority of clinical trials followed by Europe (27.0%) and Asia (20.1%). Over half of the clinical trials focused on ACL injuries (55.6%), with osteoarthritis (5.7%) and meniscus injuries (4.4%) as the next most common injury type.

Conclusion: Analysis of the ClinicalTrials.gov data permits summarization of the current scope of interventional knee injury trials. This data can be useful to decide how to proceed regarding treatment and prevention of knee injuries. They can also provide insight to the advancement of interventional clinical trial set up and execution regarding knee injuries.