This is my favorite article. It does not deal with the specifics of tissue engineering for ACLs, but it deals with the higher proportion of female ACL tears than male as well as female athletes' mentalities versus males' mentalities. The article gives a more human aspect to the issue.
- WHY NEED TISSUE ENGINEERING- "But among all the sports injuries that afflict girls and young women, A.C.L. tears, for understandable reasons, get the most attention. No other common orthopedic injury is as debilitating and disruptive in the short term — or as likely to involve serious long-term consequences. And no other injury strikes women at such markedly higher rates or terrifies them as much."
- WHY NEED TISSUE ENGINEERING- "AN A.C.L. DOES NOT tear so much as it explodes, often during routine athletic maneuvers — landings from jumps, decelerations from sprints — that look innocuous until the athlete crumples to the ground. After the A.C.L. pulls off the femur, it turns into a viscous liquid. The ligament cannot be repaired; it has to be replaced with a graft, which the surgeon usually forms by taking a slice of the patellar tendon below the kneecap or from a hamstring tendon. One reason for the long rehabilitation is that the procedure is really two operations — one at the site of the injury and the other at the donor site, where the tendon is cut."
- WOMEN AT RISK- "female athletes rupture their A.C.L.’s at rates as high as five times that of males."
- ISSUE HYPOTHETICAL EXAMPLE WOMEN AT RISK- "So imagine a hypothetical high-school soccer team of 20 girls, a fairly typical roster size, and multiply it by the conservative estimate of 200 exposures a season. The result is 4,000 exposures. In a cohort of 20 soccer-playing girls, the statistics predict that 1 each year will experience an A.C.L. injury and go through reconstructive surgery, rehabilitation and the loss of a season — an eternity for a high schooler. Over the course of four years, 4 out of the 20 girls on that team will rupture an A.C.L."
- MORE THAN INJURY-"Each of them will likely experience “a grief reaction,” says Dr. Jo Hannafin, orthopedic director of the Women’s Sports Medicine Center at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York. “They’ve lost their sport and they’ve lost the kinship of their friends, which is almost as bad as not being able to play.”
- WOMEN AT RISK DUE TO BIOMECHANICS- "“Women tend to be more erect and upright when they land, and they land harder,” he [Steve Marshall, a professor at the University of North Carolina’s School of Public Health, who leads a large A.C.L. study financed by the National Institutes of Health that is following students at the three major U.S. military academies] said. “They bend less through the knees and hips and the rest of their bodies, and they don’t absorb the impact of the landing in the same way that males do. I don’t want to sound horrible about it, but we can make a woman athlete run and jump more like a man.”"
- SERIOUS FEMALE ATHLETE PSYCHE- "JANELLE’ HIGH SCHOOL, St. Thomas Aquinas, is the alma mater of the tennis immortal Chris Evert and the former football star Michael Irvin. It places a high value on attracting and developing young athletes, and on keeping them healthy enough to go on and play in college. “I get more compliance from the boys,” the school’s athletic trainer, Dwayne Owens, told me. “Boys are actually willing to sit if that’s what I tell them. The girls want to get back out there. They want me to tape them up and let them play.” I repeatedly heard similar sentiments from doctors, coaches and others: Girls are more likely to put themselves at risk. If they’ve played through a lot of pain in the past, they may be inured to it."
- USE THIS EXAMPLE IN INTRODUCTION TO GRAB ATTENTION-
- Amy Stedman- "In her junior year in high school, in Brevard, N.C., Parade magazine named her the top high-school-age defensive player in America, “the best of the best.” She was a captain of the U.S. women’s under-19 team, a future star of the women’s national team. She played for Anson Dorrance at U.N.C., and while I was talking to him one day, he pointed out beyond his office door to a gallery where the uniforms of his all-time greats, including Mia Hamm, were displayed. “She would have been one of those jerseys out there,” he said, referring to Amy."
- "But by the time I met her, Amy was 21 and had torn the A.C.L. in her right knee four times. The first time was when she was training for the under-19 World Cup."
- "As Amy walked toward me the first time we met, her right leg was stiff and her whole gait crooked. She moved like a much older woman. If I hadn’t known her history, I would never have believed she had been an athlete, let alone an elite one. She had undergone, by her count, five operations on her right knee. Her mother counted eight, and believed that Amy did not put certain minor cuttings in the category of actual operations. She was done playing. She had been told she would need a knee replacement, maybe by the time she turned 30."
- "Amy told me about her final operation, recalling that when she came out of anesthesia, the surgeon seemed as if he was going to cry. He looked at her in silence for what seemed like a long time, trying to compose himself. Finally, he told her, “Amy, there was nothing in there left to fix.”"
- FEMALE ATHLETE PSYCHE: "That was still Janelle’s mind-set: Rehab hard. Get back on the field. Compete fiercely. And hope not to be injured."
No comments:
Post a Comment