Newsletter
Once a month (usually about the 10th) we send out a complimentary newsletter to over 3500 subscribers. It contains short articles and relevant industry news that you'll enjoy reading. Also if there are any special offers, they'll be put in the newsletter first.
Archives
July 2010 - Progressive overload Vs. Genetic potential- June 2010 - From Gym to Gmail - The Future of Fitness Part Two
- May 2010 - From Gym to Gmail - The Future of Fitness Part One
- April 2010 - Worst Interviewees - EVER!
- March 2010 - Managing Quality
February 2010 - Valentine's K.I.S.S. and Exercise and ageing- January 2010 - New Year, New Hope
- December 2009 - Why December is the 'Month of Guilt' and Custom made hips
- November 2009 - FIA news and Meniscal cartilage tears
- October 2009 - 10 ways to get the job you want AND Meniscal cartilage tears in the knee
- September 2009 - Inhouse or Freelance Personal Training?
- August 2009 - 7 reasons to be part of the fitness industry and beat the crunch
Dear Health and Fitness Enthusiast,
Welcome to the November Edition of Be A Better You - Training's newsletter.
Exercise and Industry
Rise in Gloucestershire Obesity admissions – Gloucestershire Echo
Hospital admissions for obesity have nearly doubled in the county in the last three years. There were 85 admissions due to extreme overweight in Gloucestershire in the last financial year, up from 48 in 2006/07,according to data compiled by the NHS Information Centre.NHS Gloucestershire is introducing Change 4 Life, a Government-led programme to help people eat well, move more and livelonger.
Health and Lifestyle
Fit for Work? The boss may be counting your calories - The Times
Feeling guilty about not doing enough exercise? Well, guilt might soon be the least of your problems. Thanks to a new Big Brother-style gadget being adopted by American companies — and coming to Britain early next year — bosses can measure exactly how many calories you are burning in a day and compare the data with “performance benchmarks”.
Exercise keeps dangerous visceral fat away a year after weight loss – MedicalNews Today
A study conducted by exercise physiologists in the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) Department of Human Studies finds that as little as 80 minutes a week of aerobic or resistance training helps not only to prevent weight gain, but also to inhibit a regain of harmful visceral fat one year after weight loss.
Copyright © 2009, Fitness Industry Association. All rights reserved.
The Menisci of the Knee, Part 2
‘Replacement and Regeneration’
Mr Ian McDermott
Consultant Orthopaedic Surgeon
Honorary Professor Associate, Brunel University
In the last newsletter, we summarised the details of what the menisci are, how they can tear and the problems that this causes. We also covered the basics of trimming vs repairing torn menisci. This article focuses on an even more challenging question: ‘What to do for those patients with a missing meniscal cartilage?’
Loss of a meniscal cartilage is associated with an increased risk of developing arthritis in a knee. Experimental work in the US has led to the development of artificial scaffolds of collagen, which can be fixed into the gap left by missing meniscal tissue. These scaffolds are made of bovine Achilles tendon collagen, from which the cells are removed, giving a highly porous scaffold that the patient’s cells grow into, thus regenerating and replacing the missing tissue.
The Menaflex Collagen Meniscal Scaffold has only recently become available for use in the UK, by a fairly small number of specialist surgeons who have been trained in the appropriate surgical technique – Mr McDermott being the first surgeon in London to have performed such surgery.
Surgical implantation of Menaflex Collagen Meniscal Scaffolds can lead to:-
- approximately 75% of the missing meniscal tissue will regenerate and grow back,
- patients’ pain levels are reduced and functional levels increase, and
- the number of subsequent additional surgical procedures that might be required is reduced.
For those patients who have lost too much meniscal tissue for them to be suitable for a Menaflex Collagen Meniscal Implant, Meniscal Allograft Transplantation is a potential alternative. Meniscal allografts are entire meniscal cartilages taken from donors (in a similar fashion as for kidney donors or other organ donors). However, meniscal tissue is ‘immunopriviledged’, which means that it does not cause any rejection reactions, and so they can be transplanted from one individual to another without the need for matching of tissue types and without requiring the use of nasty immunosuppressive drugs.
Meniscal allografts are particularly useful for those patients who have lost a whole meniscus. The best results are seen in knees where there is no arthritic damage yet, with good-to-excellent outcomes being reported in about 85% of patients at 5-year follow-up. If a Meniscal Allograft is implanted into a more damaged or arthritic knee, then the results are likely to be less good, although it can still delay the time when a knee replacement becomes inevitable.
In summary, there is a great deal of exciting work being undertaken in the field of reconstructive surgery of the knee. Surgeons continue to push the boundaries of what reconstructive and regenerative options are available for their patients, and as people live longer and partake in more sport, it is perhaps a relief that further exciting developments will continue to become available to us in the future.
Notes on author:-
Mr Ian McDermott is a Consultant Orthopaedic Surgeon in the Sports Orthopaedics UK Group, working in London Sports Orthopaedics and also in Northwood Sports Orthopaedics.
For further information, please contact –