SPOT 2024 – Best Sports Traumatology Paper 2024

The "Best Sports Traumatology Paper" Award, sponsored by TRUST – Gestão Integrada de Saúde, is intended to reward the best paper in that field, and held its 2nd edition at the 43rd National Congress of Orthopaedics and Traumatology of the Portuguese Society of Orthopaedics and Traumatology (SPOT), which took place in November in the Algarve.

The eight abstracts selected for public presentation are chosen according to how they fit within the scope of "Sports Traumatology", as defined by EFORT in its "European Curriculum in Orthopaedics and Trauma". Accordingly, they concern injuries caused by sporting activity that appear on the list of competencies defined by ESSKA across its six areas of speciality: knee, shoulder, foot and ankle, hip, elbow and forearm, and sport and exercise, together with sports injuries of the hand or spine as considered by the jury.

In 2024, the winner selected by the jury (Dr José Manuel Lourenço and Dr Ricardo Aido) was the paper entitled "Career Length After Surgically Treated ACL Plus Collateral Ligament Injury in Elite Athletes" (Vítor Hugo Pinheiro; Mitzi Laughlin; Kyle Borque; Dylan Ngo; Madison Kent; Mary Jones; Nuno Neves; Fernando Fonseca; Andy Williams).

A few weeks after this award, reinforcing the quality and relevance of the study carried out, the award-winning paper was published in The American Journal of Sports Medicine, one of the leading international journals in the field of Sports Traumatology.

An Honourable Mention was also awarded to the paper "Acute ruptures of the Achilles tendon: the outcomes of surgical treatment over 10 years" (Paula Alves Sousa, Belmiro Alves; Miguel Pimentel; Antónia Martins; Sara Macedo).