New Advances in Diagnosing and Treating Lisfranc 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 describes how Lisfranc injuries, which affect the main arch of the foot, require operative treatments such as realigning bones and joints or fusing joints together
In this video, Christopher W. DiGiovanni, MD, chief of Foot and Ankle Service at Massachusetts General Hospital, describes how Lisfranc injuries, which affect the main arch of the foot, require operative treatments such as realigning bones and joints or fusing joints together. He believes in the next two decades, researchers will develop better ways to help patients with inherited or acquired foot injuries return to a “better health span.”
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Transcript
Lisfranc injuries are another relatively common injury in active people and the athletic population. Lisfranc injuries involve the main arch of your foot, and what happens is whether there are fractures or not these patients will develop sufficient ligament damage to cause instability, so there is excess movement in the arch, and since we walk on our feet, and we need our arches to support the architecture of the rest of our body day-to-day work and function when the arch becomes injured or unhealthy there are significant downstream effects. A Lisfranc injury can very much accelerate those problems.
Some of the research in our lab is trying to devise better ways, and more successful ways to fix these injuries. That involves, in some cases, just realigning bones and joints with plates and screws, or alternatively fusing some of these joints together. We are now learning, through our research, which patients each of those different operations work best in.
If you were to ask me what's on the horizon for the world of foot and ankle, I would tell you that there are lots of different types of sports injuries, and foot deformities that people either are born with or acquire, there are lots of different types of arthritic maladies for which we don't have good solutions like hip or knee replacements, and all of these things, in my opinion, in the next 10 to 20 years are going to change dramatically, and we are going to have much better ways of getting patients back to what, I would call, a better health span.
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