SAN DIEGO, Calif. (Ivanhoe Newswire) – From professional athletes to weekend sportspeople, knee pain is one of the most common sports injuries for both men and women. Complex knee injuries are some of the most difficult to treat. This is when multiple parts of the knee are damaged at the same time, including ligaments, meniscus, cartilage and bone. Athletes can be sidelined for years, if not forever. Now, a new transplant option is breathing new life into damaged knees.
Tatum Vedder’s passion is volleyball. He served, set and spiked throughout high school and college, but an injury benched the competitive volleyball player at age 22.
“When I was injured, it sounded much louder than it actually felt,” she said.
Vedder tore his anterior cruciate ligament and meniscus, detaching cartilage from the bottom of his femur, and underwent three surgeries and 20 months of physical therapy, but the pain persisted.
“I was just trying to get better,” she said.
Tim Wang, MD, an orthopedic surgeon at Scripps Clinic in San Diego, California, took a unique approach to Vedder’s treatment. He reconstructed his anterior cruciate ligament, but he also performed two unusual transplant procedures. First, he harvested living cartilage and bone from a donor. He removed a small, coin-shaped, cylindrical section of damaged cartilage and underlying bone and replaced it with a piece of cartilage and bone from a healthy donor.
“It’s much like repairing drywall, in that you drill or enlarge a coin-shaped hole in the problem area and then create a matching coin from a donor,” Dr. Wang explained.
The other surgery involved replacing Vedder’s medial meniscus with healthy tissue from a donor.
“It’s strong, it’s consistent, it’s 100 percent what I feel like it went well,” Vedder said.
After physical therapy, Vedder returned to the beach to celebrate, this time catching some waves and getting back in the game.
Wang said the best candidates for the transplant are active men and women under 40 who have tried physical therapy and steroid injections but still experience pain.
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