A Closer Look at an Adjunct Treatment for Tendon Repair

Hi, I'm Dr. Patrick McEneaney. I'm CEO of Northern Illinois Foot and Ankle Specialists. I'm co-director of the Northwest Illinois Foot and Ankle Foundation Fellowship.
 
When we started looking at this, we've been using different tissues for many years to adjunct our soft tissue repairs of tendons. We've used so many different products and we've been working with fish skin for our wounds and we noticed the characteristics and the tissue handling properties were very similar to other types of tissues we were using in our repairs.
 
The strength and the elasticity and the durability of the tissue made us kind of wanted to use this as something that would be around the tendons and could allow the tendons to nurse themselves back to health while then using the local tissue to help repair itself.
 
What we found is that we had really good results with this. As an adjunct, we were like, how do we justify that this is a good product and can we look at something to say, well, maybe this tissue might be better than other tissues?
 
The three of us sat down and we're discussing this and came up with the idea to do MRIs afterward of the fact and look at the actual tendon and see how the tissue was integrating into the tendon and what actually happened after we've done these repairs.
 
I haven't seen a lot of studies that look at this kind of things. We thought it would be an interesting thing to look at.