Postoperative Rehabilitation of Posterior Cruciate Ligament Surgery: A Systematic Review

Posterior cruciate ligament (PCL) injuries can be debilitating knee injuries, having involvement in up to 44% of traumatic knee injuries. However, isolated PCL injuries are relatively infrequent. Therefore, effective evidence-based rehabilitation protocols have proven to be elusive. This systematic review aims to summarize the latest evidence on postoperative rehabilitation protocols for patients undergoing PCL reconstruction. Studies included in this paper included those published from 1991 to 2019 with a grade 1 to 5 level of evidence discussing the postoperative PCL rehabilitation. A multidatabase search using largely PubMed and Ovid was conducted using relevant keywords such as “PCL,” “postoperative,” and “rehabilitation,” initially leading to 955 papers, which were narrowed by relevance to 12 final published studies used in the analysis. Through careful review of the evidence, crucial principles of rehabilitation, such as an initial focus on protecting the graft during strengthening, as well as an optimized PCL reconstruction protocol are presented here. Rehabilitation following PCL reconstruction continues to be limited by a lack of high-quality evidence-based publications.