Clinical Pearls on the Tendon Procedure

Hi, I'm Rimi Statkus from Northern Illinois Foot and Ankle Specialist, one of the podiatric surgeons, a fellow of the American College of Foot and Ankle Surgeons and Research Coordinator for the Northwest Illinois Foot and Ankle Foundation Fellowship Program.
 
In regards to the study that we undertook and looking at our cohort, we focus mainly on the Achilles and peroneal tendons, mainly longitudinal tears, and then looking at the pre-op and then postoperatively at the two weeks, six weeks, and one year follow-up, and then using a validator of the AFAS score, and notice there's a significant improvement from the pre and postoperatively reports from the patients.
 
We did notice that there was a significant improvement in terms of the functional capacity, which is a big thing. We didn't focus too much on other areas such as pain scores, which would be another area to look at, because we know using fish skin that there is that anti-inflammatory component, which we didn't appreciate beforehand how important this actually is, and more so use of this graft in the surgical field and in elective cases versus wound care, which is predominantly where we've seen it before.
 
Overall, we had 19 patients for our study. As I said, we followed up from week two, six, and a year follow-up. We're able to follow up most of the patients all the way through. We hopefully looked to expand to increase our power with this, because we did have really positive outcomes with this.