The fear of sports injury is the ever-present, though less-focused-on, reality that plagues tournaments like March Madness, especially players who play the most games — the Final Four.
But now, new treatments and new rehab tools are being developed to manage injuries like patellar tendonitis or perform anterior cruciate ligament reconstruction.
When Investment Rhymes with Canada
Canada has a proud history of achievement in the areas of science and technology, and the field of biomanufacturing and life sciences is no exception.
Here are two, one on the forefront of medicine that has gained popularity over the last five years, and the other, a rehab device whose inventor believes it can change how people — players and others — can regain balance and strength.
Platelet Rich Plasma injections: Autologous blood — or the patient’s own blood — holds the key to this treatment. Blood is drawn from the injured athlete’s arm and then spun in a centrifuge so that it is concentrated to become platelet-rich-plasma that has growth factors with healing properties. Injections of the so-called PRP at the site of the injury during surgery can help speed up recovery, said Dr. Jeffrey Macalena, orthopedic surgeon at the Sports Medicine Institute at the University of Minnesota, part of the department of orthopedics.
Previously, athletes would be advised to rest, avoid activity and ingest anti-inflammatory drugs to help the healing process.
“There’s a movement in orthopedics surgery and in musculoskeletal care to use platelet-rich plasma,” Macalena said. “So, for instead of time and waiting for anti-inflammatories to work, here you have the opportunity to inject some healing growth factors back into the site of the injury.”
The injections can be used either as a first line of treatment, or it can be administered during surgery to speed up healing, Macalena said. He noted that although clinical evidence is scant, some have suggested that PRP injections reduces the pain that players suffer. But the challenge is that insurance companies don’t cover this treatment because research is ongoing.
“By no means is this the standard of care, yet,” Macalena cautioned. “No one is saying that PRP is an alternative to surgery.”
Many manufacturers make the centrifuge to concentrate platelet-rich plasma, including Circle Biologics, a Minnesota company that makes a base centrifuge able to concentrate PRP (as well as platelet-poor plasma) in 15 minutes. Other companies like Harvest Technologies in Massachusetts also make the centrifuges.
Gravity Bed: When athletes suffer injury, one of the first casualties is balance. Regaining that balance is crucial to getting back on your feet (pun intended). That’s where the Gravity Bed comes in.
Developed by Lars Oddsson, director of the Sister Kenny Research Center in Minnesota, when he was at Boston University, the Gravity Bed aims to get an injured person to perform functional exercises and bear load earlier than is currently possible.
Here’s how the Gravity Bed works, in Oddsson’s own (slightly edited) words:
The device allows someone to lie down on a flat surface on air bearings — so you are kind of floating like a hockey puck. There is a back pack frame that holds those air bearings that you are floating on and the back pack frame is attached to a weight stack. You have to push yourself away from the support system near your feet, which is kind of like your floor even though you are lying down. The fact that you are lying on air bearings makes you drift from side to side and you have to balance yourself when you lie down because there is no friction in that direction and this attachment is close to your center of gravity and so it functions like a virtual gravity load. So, if someone has pain or cannot stand up because of illness or disease or whatever it can be, this contraption allows you to lie down and execute balance training that is very functional and carries over to upright standing.
The device can also adjust the gravity setting that can slowly be increased as the patient’s balance improves. Oddsson is developing the product and a cheaper home-use version called Flamingo with the help of the Sister Kenny Research Institute, which has an incubation program for novel therapies.
Oddsson said that after common ACL reconstruction, doctors want patients to perform functional exercises as soon as possible, but patients can’t do that immediately either because of pain or because the graft is not strong enough to support the full load of the body. That’s when the Gravity Bed can be an option because a low-gravity setting can be used to help the patient learn to stand on one leg or step back and forth using two legs, all the while lying down.
“The brain has to figure out how you place your leg and that all of a sudden turns on all the sensory information from the whole body and even around the injury area that is used by the brain to control the motion,” Oddsson said. “You can’t release that sensory feedback benefit unless you have functional exercise and that’s what this system allows you to do much earlier than currently can be done with the gold-standard treatment of rehab.”
Patients are going to be tested to further research and develop the product later this year, Oddsson said. A cheaper, outpatient, home-use version of the Gravity Bed called Flamingo has also been developed.
“Flamingos stand on one leg and sleep and balance very well,” Oddsson explained.
