New Advances in Healing Fifth Metatarsal Injuries
In This Video
- Christopher W. DiGiovanni, MD, is chief of the Foot and Ankle Service at Massachusetts General Hospital, team physician for Boston College Athletics, consultant team physician for the U.S. Ski Team and associate professor of orthopaedic surgery at Harvard Medical School
- In this video, he explains how fifth metatarsal injuries burden a sizeable portion of the athletic patient population. His research team is working on better implants to increase the chance and speed of bone healing and treatment options that allow for weight-bearing sooner
- He explains how researchers are working to increase the chance and speed of healing from fifth metatarsal injuries
In this video, Christopher W. DiGiovanni, MD, chief of the Foot and Ankle Service at Massachusetts General Hospital, explains how fifth metatarsal injuries burden a sizeable portion of the athletic patient population. His research team is working on better implants to increase the chance and speed of bone healing and treatment options that allow for weight-bearing sooner.
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Transcript
Fifth metatarsal injuries or fractures represent another very common injury that we see in the active population and the athletic population. In fact we probably have patients on a weekly basis in our office, in our clinics who come in with these injuries. They in many cases are notorious for either not healing well or healing very slowly or not healing at all.
And this represents a clinical void in the world of foot and ankle because we need to be able to take care of this patient population in manners that facilitate a faster return to work or return to the playing field and better ways of getting these bones to heal. So in terms of research, right now in our lab we are working on different constructs, different types of implants that fix these bones better and maximize the chance of the bone healing and also the speed with which the bone heals.
The other thing we're working on is trying to address these bones in ways that enable patients to put weight more quickly on their foot and thereby get out of immobilization like a cast or a boot and be able to get back to their day-to-day activity in an easier fashion.
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