As the high school football season begins, many young athletes are pushing their bodies to the limit to prepare themselves for the physical demands required to compete at a high level. Often, as the result of not being in “game shape” and lacking proper hydration, many expose themselves to and suffer from common preseason soft tissue injuries such as hamstring or quadriceps pulls, Achilles tendon strains or patella tendon injuries. While many of the treatment modalities that have been used on these injuries for decades remain useful, there are other powerful methods now available that are helping heal players faster, more completely and without the need for surgical intervention.
[See: How to Know If You’re Exercising Too Much.]
In the case of hamstring pulls or strains, the most common cause of these injuries is something physicians refer to as “muscle overload.” This phenomenon occurs when the hamstring muscle is either challenged with the burden of a sudden load to bear or is simply stretched beyond its capacity. Sprinting drills during practice can often result in a pulled hamstring. As for patellar tendon tears, the most typical causes of these injuries in both professional and youth football athletes are from jumping, falls or direct impact from a strong force, and simple overall weakness of the tendon itself. Of course, the risk factors for injuries like these are many, but often distill to one concept in the young football athlete: improper conditioning. Daily stretching both on the field and off, total body conditioning (as opposed to conditioning one muscle group), proper body mechanics, learning how to fall to protect oneself from injury, hydration and proper rest are all important factors in preventing hamstring injuries.
So what are a player, his coaches/trainers and his family to do when a hamstring or patellar tendon injury occurs? First, follow the RICE protocol: rest, ice, compression and elevation. This is often the front lines of treatment for mild hamstring strains. In some cases of hamstring and partial or very small patellar tendon tears, a period of immobilization and physical therapy may also be useful. Surgical treatment is typically required for most patients who have sustained hamstring or patellar tendon injuries where the muscle has torn completely away from the bone. But what about those injuries that are moderate and don’t respond well to RICE, immobilization or physical therapy, yet aren’t so severe that surgery is the only option? This is where the benefit of biologic, platelet rich plasma or stem cell therapy can prove incredibly powerful and useful. And despite most high school athletes thinking it’s only used for top professional athletes, they, too, are reaping the benefits of this rapidly evolving medical science.
[See: 9 Sports Injuries That Sideline Kids.]
The goal of regenerative cell-based therapies such as PRP or stem cell therapy is to enhance the recruitment, proliferation and differentiation of cells involved in tissue regeneration (hamstring and patella tendon tissues in this case) by speeding, restarting or redirecting the healing process. Stem cell therapy is a promising treatment for the high school football athlete — when it’s injected accurately, at the hands of a skilled expert, and combined with the expertise of orthopedic professionals who understand the rehab protocols necessary for ultimate success. The early research has shown that PRP, or PRP in combination with bone marrow aspirate concentrate, produces a regenerative response (success), but is highly dependent upon the formulation of the PRP/stem cell product (the quality of technique in harvesting the cells), the severity of the injury and supervised protected therapeutic/rehabilitative progression.
[See: 5 Unintended Consequences of Eating Too Much Protein.]
When it comes to the advances in medicine today, physicians have enough trouble staying ahead of the curve, let alone the public or coaches and athletic trainers. I offer this information about the promise of stem cell therapy in the hopes that it continues to increase awareness among high school football team staffs of the treatment alternatives available to their players for these common soft tissue injuries. If it saves even one young athlete from undergoing surgery he really didn’t need and gets him back on the field to enjoy the game, then the effort is well worth it.
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The Promise of Biologics to Treat High School Football Injuries originally appeared on usnews.com
