National Football League Funds Colorado State Research In Conjunction With Leading Human Sports Medicine Foundation
Monday, February 24, 1997
FORT COLLINS--The National Football League has teamed up with Colorado
State
University researchers and Vail's noted Steadman-Hawkins Sports Medicine
Foundation to develop
new methods for treating knee injuries.
Ongoing research efforts headed by Colorado State's Dr. C. Wayne
McIlwraith have shown
promising results in treating knee injuries with a new surgical technique.
The research also will
explore enhancing treatment with injection of growth factors, or hormones.
The ongoing research is
funded by grants from the National Football League Charities.
The surgical technique, developed by Dr. J. Richard Steadman, is called
microfracture and
involves punching small holes in the subchondral bone in the knee near a
joint surface injury.
Colorado State researchers also plan to use the surgical process in
conjunction with biomedical
applications of growth factor hormones to promote healing of disabling knee
injuries.
The combined treatments could prevent injured horses and athletes who
suffer from
osteoarthritis--a degenerative joint disease characterized by the breakdown
of the joint's cartilage--from
needing joint replacements. Cartilage breakdown causes bone to rub against
bone, resulting in pain and
loss of movement. The disease affects weight-bearing joints such as knees,
hips, feet and back.
The NFL-funded study is the result of an initial collaboration between
McIlwraith, director of
Equine Sciences and Orthopaedic Research at Colorado State, and Steadman, an
internationally-
renowned human orthopaedic surgeon and director of the Steadman-Hawkins
Sports Medicine
Foundation in Vail. The research team includes David Frisbie, Gayle Trotter,
Barbara Powers, Louise
Southwood and Julie Oxford, all doctors from Colorado State's College of
Veterinary Medicine and
Biomedical Sciences. Dr. Bill Rodkey from the Steadman-Hawkins clinic also is
on the team.
The equine orthopaedic research program has had a number of projects
aimed at healing knee
cartilage defects in race horses with funds from the Colorado State Horse
Racing Commission.
Meanwhile, Steadman had developed the microfracture technique as a possible
new approach in
treating humans with debilitating knee joint conditions.
Steadman and McIlwraith teamed up to test the procedure in horses, which
like human
athletes, frequently sustain partial or full defects to knee cartilage. Like
humans, horses also can be
treated with athroscopic surgery in which a small microscope is inserted into
the knee joint. In
addition, the thickness and composition of knee cartilage in horses is
similar to that of humans. The
joint on horses that is the equivalent of the human knee is actually called
the stifle and is farther up
the horses' leg. The joint known as the horse's knee is actually more
equivalent to the human wrist.
In the first year of study at Colorado State, 10 horses with articular
cartilage loss, or
osteoarthritis, were operated on using the microfracture procedure. Six weeks
after the operations,
lesions that had received the microfracture technique started producing a
mature forum of type II
collagen, a "building block" found in normal knee cartilage.
Further long-term studies in horses showed that lesions undergoing
microfracture operations
had a greater amount of healthy tissue present over time and a better
adherence of the tissue to the
subchondral bone in the knee compared with other surgery methods.
The research team also identified a source of healing growth factor
proteins that could be
injected in joints to speed healing following the microfracture procedure.
The second year of funding
from the NFL will be used to investigate these proteins and other ways to
promote better healing of
cartilage defects.
According to the National Arthritis Foundation, about 15.8 million
Americans have
osteoarthritis. The foundation said musculoskeletal conditions such as
osteoarthritis cost the U.S.
economy an estimated $54.6 billion annually in direct medical expenses, lost
wages and lost worker
production.
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