The use of cadaver replacement ligaments may not be the best choice for young, athletic patients who have surgery to repair a torn anterior cruciate ligament (ACL), a study reported Thursday at the American Orthopedic Society for Sports Medicine conference in Orlando, Florida, revealed.

More exactly, the study found that ACL reconstructions that use cadaver tissue fail in 23 percent of patients younger than 40.

ACL injuries are something frequent in young people who practice high-risk sports. In order to repair a torn ACL, doctors replace the damaged ligament with a new one, from either a cadaver or the patient’s own body.

An estimated 100,000 ACL reconstructions are performed in the U.S. annually, 20 percent of them using cadaver donor tissue, according to the background information of the study.

For the study, Kurre Luber, MD, an orthopedic surgery fellow at Mississippi Sports Medicine and Orthopedic Center and colleagues analyzed data from 64 patients with an average age of 28 who had ACL reconstructions using cadaver tissue.

Two years after the surgery, 15 of the patients’ ACL reconstructions (23.4 percent) had failed, meaning that the patients had to undergo a second reconstruction due to injury or graft failure or poor scores on orthopedic-related tests. The failure rate in an older group was only 2.4 percent.

“This study found a very high failure rate in patients 10 years and younger with high activity levels in ACL-dependent sports like tennis, basketball, soccer, and downhill skiing,” Dr. Luber said in a statement, according to WebMD.

He further added that doctors should consider the findings “when putting a (cadaver replacement ligament) in a young active patient because our data certainly suggest that they are more likely to fail.”