Read the latest health and medical information to make informed decisions about your health care concerns.
For tens of thousands of years, humans ran on bare feet. Then we developed an assortment of specialized shoes, including – particularly since the 1960s – a seemingly limitless variety of running shoes. Despite the perceived advantages of foot protection, some runners in recent years have returned to barefoot running, believing it is a more natural way to run and therefore less injurious to the feet and legs.
Children playing tackle football are more likely to sustain a concussion during games and not practice, according to recent study results published in The Journal of Pediatrics.
Soccer training makes the heart ten years younger
“We discovered that soccer training significantly improved the flexibility of the heart and furthermore, that the cardiac muscle tissue was able to work 29% faster. This means that after three months of training, the heart had become 10 years ‘younger’”, explains Medical Doctor, PhD Student, JakobFriis Schmidt, who co-authored the study alongside with PhD student, Thomas Rostgaard Andersen. He adds:
Sometimes innovative science requires innovative machinery, like a moveable, four-legged robotic sled that can wear shoes, a contraption recently developed and deployed by researchers at the University of Calgary to test whether grippy athletic shoes affect injury risk.
It’s well known, of course, that shoe traction influences athletic performance, especially in sports that involve sprinting or cutting, meaning abrupt rapid shifts in direction. In broad terms, more traction leads to better results.
Descriptions of fracture healing almost exclusively deal with shaft fractures and they often emphasize endochondral bone formation. In reality, most fractures occur in metaphysealcancellous bone. Apart from a study of vertebral fractures, authors have not found any histological description of cancellous bone healing in humans. The histology suggests that cells in the midst of the marrow respond to the trauma by direct formation of bone, independently of trabecular surfaces.
Following a complicated eight hour operation using a donor limb and matching tissue, the first successful hand transplant was completed in the UK on December 27, 2012.
The recipient was a 51-year-old man named Mark Cahill, a pub landlord from Halifax. His right hand became unusable after it was infected with gout. A surgical group at Leeds General Infirmary was led by Professor Simon Kay. The team removed Cahill’s hand at the same time as they replaced it with the donor hand. This is the first time this method has been used, permitting precise restoration of nerve structures.
While athletes suffer from traumatic forms of the injury, for many others age is to blame for torn rotator cuffs. It’s believed millions of Americans over 60 suffer from one. Every year 250 thousand people go under the knife for relief, but now there’s a surgery-free alternative you can do for free!
Just taking plates out of the cupboard was excruciating for Kay Subhawong.
She has a torn rotator cuff. The small muscles that hold the shoulder joint together have ripped apart.
The rotator cuff is made up of tendons and muscles in the shoulder. The tendons and muscles connect the upper arm bone with the shoulder blade and they hold the ball of the upper arm bone in the shoulder socket. The combination means greater range of motion of any joint in the body. A rotator cuff injury can include any type of irradiation or damage to the tendons and muscles. Causes of an injury can include lifting, falling, and repetitive arm activities (usually those that are done overhead like throwing a baseball). About 50 percent of rotator cuff injuries can heal with self-care or exercise therapy.
Reconstructive hand surgery can dramatically enhance the life quality and independence of those paralyzed by a cervical spinal cord injury. Despite this, the operation is not frequently performed, either in Sweden or elsewhere. Researchers at the Sahlgrenska Academy are now hoping to change that.
A cervical spinal cord injury entails paralysis in both arms and legs, severely limiting daily life for its victims. Previous studies have shown that the capability that those with cervical spinal cord injuries most wish to recover is a functioning hand.
A study at Hospital for Special Surgery (HSS) found that a surgical procedure known as the “docking technique” to repair a torn elbow ligament in teenage athletes yielded favorable results. The outcomes were better than those in previously published reports on reconstruction of the ulnar collateral ligament (UCL), also known as Tommy John surgery, in this age group and may be attributed to technique-specific factors, according to the study authors.
The paper, titled, “The Docking Technique for Elbow Ulnar Collateral Ligament Insufficiency: Two-Year Follow Up in Adolescent Athletes,” was presented at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons in Chicago.
You are certainly right that sore shoulders are common, especially as a person ages. About half of all middle-aged tennis players suffer from shoulder pain, according to a 2012 study in The British Journal of Sports Medicine, and youngsters aren’t immune either. The same study reported that about a quarter of competitive tennis players under 20 hurt their shoulders every year.
Many of these injuries involve the rotator cuff, the group of muscles and tendons at the back of the shoulder that stabilize the joint. Studies show that forces equivalent to at least 120 percent of a person’s body weight slam through the rotator cuff during a typical tennis serve or baseball pitch. To withstand that pounding, the rotator cuff needs to be strong.
Researchers report in Nature Genetics that they have increased the number of confirmed genes linked to juvenile idiopathic arthritis (JIA) from three to 17 – a finding that will clarify how JIA fits into the spectrum of autoimmune disorders and help identify potential treatment targets.
The published study involves an international research team that analyzed 2,816 JIA cases recruited from more than 40 pediatric rheumatology clinics. It was the largest collaborative patient population of JIA to date, including patient DNA samples from across the United States, Germany and United Kingdom, according to Susan Thompson, PhD, a researcher in the Division of Rheumatology at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center who was a leader for the study.
Brisk walking can reduce a person’s risk of diabetes, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol just as much as running can.
Walking and running provide an ideal test of the health benefits of moderate-intensity walking and vigorous-intensity running because they involve the same muscle groups and the same activities performed at different intensities.”
A Wake Forest University study finds up to 65 percent of runners suffers an overuse injury each year. More and more are looking for new ways to avoid these aches and pains. Now, there’s one trend that some swear by, but you may have to say goodbye to what many consider to be the most important piece of running gear.
Trudging from place to place with heavy weights on our backs is an everyday reality, from schoolchildren toting textbooks in backpacks to fire fighters and soldiers carrying occupational gear. Muscle and skeletal damage are very real concerns. Now Tel Aviv University researchers say that nerve damage, specifically to the nerves that travel through the neck and shoulders to animate our hands and fingers, is also a serious risk.
Tennis elbow is also known as lateral epicondylitis. In tennis elbow, the tendons that attach the forearm muscles to the outer part of the elbow degenerate, become inflamed and develop tears. Tennis players often irritate this area during backhand strokes. Anyone who uses a twisting motion is at risk including painters, carpenters, plumbers, cooks, weight lifters, and butchers. It may also develop by some who are constantly using a computer keyboard and mouse.
Soft Tissue Regeneration, an early stage orthopedic device company that has developed a breakthrough tissue engineering platform used to regenerate ligaments and tendons, announced today that it has received FDA clearance to market its STR GRAFT, a biodegradable scaffold used for soft tissue augmentation and rotator cuff repair.
Developed by Cato T. Laurencin , M.D., Ph.D., an orthopedic surgeon and the company’s founder, the STR GRAFT is a three-dimensional braided engineered matrix that Laurencin likens to a patch. During surgery, surgeons can drape this biodegradable patch over the tendon that sits on the shoulder bone, anchoring it with sutures to keep it in place while the tendon, bones and nearby tissues heal. Unlike currently available devices, which are made of weaker cadaver or animal tissue that can cause sutures to pull, the STR GRAFT is thinner—about 1 millimeter—and stronger, which lessens pain, speeds recovery time and drastically reduces surgical failure rates.
A Phase 3 clinical trial demonstrates that tofacitinib improves disease activity and inhibits progression of joint damage in rheumatoid arthritis (RA) patients who did not respond to methotrexate (MTX). Results of the 12-month interim analysis of the efficacy of tofacitinib appear in Arthritis & Rheumatism, a journal published by Wiley on behalf of the American College of Rheumatology (ACR).
RA is a chronic, autoimmune disease that causes inflammation, pain and swelling of the joints. Over time, RA may destroy joints, impair daily function, and lead to significant disability. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that RA affects up to one percent of individuals worldwide and 1.3 million of those are Americans according to the ACR.
Adding movement to mental rehearsal can improve performance finds a study in BioMed Central’s open access journal Behavioral and Brain Functions. For high jumpers the study shows that dynamic imagery improves the number of successful attempts and the technical performance of jumps.
The technique of mental rehearsal is used to consolidate performance in many disciplines including music and sport. Motor imagery and physical practice use overlapping neural networks in the brain and the two together can improve performance as well as promoting recovery from injury. Researchers from the Centre de Recherche et d’Innovation sur le Sport found that adding simple movements to mental rehearsal could further improve performance by a third.
Exercise doesn’t only strengthen your heart and muscles – it also beefs up your brain. Dozens of studies now show that aerobic exercise can increase the size of critical brain structures and improve cognition in children and older adults.
University of Illinois psychology professor Art Kramer, a nationally recognized expert on the role of physical fitness on cognition, discussed these brain-changing outcomes at a session of the 2013 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Boston. Kramer is the director of the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at the U. of I.
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