Just when you thought that every part of the human body had been located, Belgian doctors have found a new knee ligament. Now you may think it’s wonderful that we have such high tech scanners that we can identify new parts we have never seen before. So how did they find it? Gross dissection!. That’s right, they cut open 41 knees and looked at them and 40 of them had this ligament which apparently nobody noticed in the millenium or so since doctors have dissected bodies. Then again, we are talking about orthopedists here who don’t typically have the reputation as the brightest bulbs in the medical world. Anyway, back to correct my anatomy textbooks and add in the ALL (anterolateral ligament).
How did this get missed? There must be a hundred thousand knee procedures done annually. You’d think someone would notice an extra ligament.
It is cool that they found something new. Da Vinci must have overlooked it too. 
To be accurate, the existence of the ligament was postulated 130 years ago, but it was never described anatomically. This is the first time that anybody has done dissection designed to specifically look at whether this ligament exists and in what percentage of people it can be found. In addition, they are now postulating the function of the ligament. When experiments are done confirming the function then I will consider the function of this ligament to be “discovered”. However, to clarify, you can simply change my title to “prevously postulated ligament in human knee now proved to actually exist in 97% of samples”.
OK, thanks for the additional info, because based on the io9 article (which I ran across earlier today) I was having trouble figuring out how anyone even got to “new ligament found in knee” based on the excerpted study.
No it’s not. Here’s a study on it in almost two years ago.
In that instance it was found in 40 out of 40 knees. “Anatomically described” simply means, “what the hell does it do exactly”. It’s existence has been known for two centuries. It has not been recently discovered. The only thing that has been discovered is the fact that it may play a role in preventing “pivot shift”.
I’m in agreement with MsWhatsit. This is sensationalist news of the highest level!
I stand corrected. Ignorance fought.
I’ve probably torn that one too.
Lowest level?
I’d say it was about knee level.
I KNOW I have. Pivot shift gets me every time. Now at least I know what to swear at when it happens.