(Press-News.org) HUNTINGTON, W.Va. – The Marshall University Joan C. Edwards School of Medicine is now accepting applicants for an observational trial focused on fertilized anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) reconstruction.
Unlike traditional ACL repairs, fertilized ACL surgery uses a biologic concentrate of the patient’s stem cells, bone marrow and autograft bone along with an internal brace with the goal of stabilizing and expediting the healing process.
“Past patients of the fertilized ACL have already shown shorter recovery times with no known additional risks to the patient,” said Chad D. Lavender, M.D., primary investigator of the study and assistant professor at the Joan C. Edwards School of Medicine. “With this large-scale study, we hope to determine whether patients, particularly athletes, who have undergone this type of surgery can return to play sooner, which could be a game changer for their sports careers.”
With conventional ACL reconstruction, athletes typically expect a year of recovery before they can play again. However, many of Lavender’s patients who have undergone fertilized ACL surgery have cut this recovery time in half. This study includes three tests designed to assess when athletes can return to play post-surgery. Biomechanical testing and/or virtual reality testing will track the individuals’ movement to provide objective data on their reaction time, joint angles and acceleration to guide decision making. Force plate testing will look at the musculoskeletal system to see how the participants handle jumping and balance. Inertial measurement unit (IMU) testing will measure movement and focus on how the muscles react.
Patient-reported outcomes will also be measured before surgery, and at 6 weeks, 3 months, 4.5 months, 6 months, 9 months, one year and two years, post-surgery. At 6 months, all participants will undergo magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of the injured knee to investigate bone socket size. At two years, patients will be asked whether their ACL has re-ruptured.
As founder of the fertilized ACL, Lavender has completed hundreds of procedures on patients from 27 states and internationally. Timothy E. Hewett, Ph.D., professor at the school of medicine, will lead the biomechanical testing and evaluation.
Marshall is currently accepting up to 450 patients for the trial, with approximately 125-150 patients in the FACL group. All patients must be between the ages of 14 and 26. Patients who have undergone previous ACL reconstructive surgery or with multi-ligament surgery are not eligible. Surgeries will only be performed at Cabell Huntington Hospital, a member of Marshall Health Network.
Participants will attend regularly scheduled study visits with Marshall Health physicians for ongoing assessment. Any additional screenings used solely for the study will be at no cost to the patient. To schedule a consultation or for more information about the clinical trial, please call Marshall Orthopaedics at 304.691.6710 or visit marshallhealth.org/research.
Marshall is the only center in the country performing this type of clinical trial. Arthrex provided partial funding of this study.
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Study 1982669-3 has been approved by the Marshall University Institutional Review Board #1.
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New York State is vulnerable to increasing weather-driven power outages, with vulnerable people in the Bronx, Queens and other parts of New York City being disproportionately affected.
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Article URL: https://journals.plos.org/climate/article?id=10.1371/journal.pclm.0000364
Article Title: Powerless in the storm: Severe weather-driven power outages in New York State, 2017–2020
Author Countries: United States
Funding: This work was supported by the National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) P30 ES009089 ...
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Simulations of agriculture on Mars using pea, carrot and tomato plants suggest that intercropping, growing different crops mixed together, could boost yields in certain conditions
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Article URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0302149
Article Title: Intercropping on Mars: A promising system to optimise fresh food production in future martian colonies
Author Countries: The Netherlands
Funding: The author(s) received no specific funding for this work. END ...
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A new study led environmental health scientists at Columbia University ...
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Their approach worked well in experiments with mice and ferrets and may lead to more broadly-protective influenza vaccines and less reliance on an annual shot tailored to that year’s versions of the virus. Even with vaccines, influenza kills about a half-million people each year around the world.
This new vaccine approach, described May 1 in the journal Science Translational ...
EMBARGOED: Not for Release Until 14:00 U.S. Eastern Time (19:00 UK Time) on Wednesday, 01 May 2024
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In a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) study that integrated high-resolution structural and functional connectivity data, researchers mapped a subcortical brain network that is believed to integrate arousal and awareness in human consciousness
In a paper titled, “Multimodal ...
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Although seismologists have been making these maps for about 50 years, they know very little about how well they actually forecast shaking, because large damaging earthquakes are infrequent in any area.
To learn more, the Northwestern research team compiled shaking data from past earthquakes. These include CHIMP (California Historical Intensity Mapping Project) ...
AI holds the potential to help doctors find early markers of disease and policymakers to avoid decisions that lead to war. But a growing body of evidence has revealed deep flaws in how machine learning is used in science, a problem that has swept through dozens of fields and implicated thousands of erroneous papers.
Now an interdisciplinary team of 19 researchers, led by Princeton University computer scientists Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor, has published guidelines for the responsible use of machine learning in science.
“When we graduate from traditional statistical methods to machine learning methods, there are a vastly ...
