New Orthopedic Surgeon Brings Innovative Techniques, Research Expertise
An Excerpt from the Virginia Hospital Center's Medical Staff News
Anterior Cruciate Ligament injuries are among the most common sports injuries. For more than a decade, experts have debated why these injuries occur most often in women. Female athletes in sports like soccer and basketball are between three and four times as likely than their male counterparts to injure their ACL. Now, a top military orthopedic surgeon whose landmark research is helping to answer that question has joined the staff at Virginia Hospital Center.
Just retired after 24 years of military service, during which he worked primarily in academic medicine, Patrick St. Pierre, MD, brings a wide variety of expertise to the hospital. in 2002, Dr. St. Pierre won the American Orthopedic Society for Sports Medicine's prestigious O'Donoghue Research Society for a comprehensive study of the ACL risk factors he conducted from 1995 to 1999 at the United States Military Academy. The study was published in the November-December 2003 issue of the American Journal of Sports Medicine. "We began the study with 1,198 cadets, and 895 of them completed it," he says. "One of the strongest predictors of ACL injury in women was a higher than normal body mass index. Another very significant risk factor was a small femoral notch width found on an x-ray. The femoral notch is the space at the end of the femur where the ACL lives, and if it's smaller, the ACL can get caught and then torn in a twisting injury. Since women in general have a smaller femoral notch, this could be one of the reasons why women get more ACL tears.
Dr. St. Pierre has also won research awards studying rotator cuff repair and recently devised a new technique for arthroscopic rotator cuff repair call the footprint cruciate technique. This technique is a modified version of the standard suture method, the Mason-Allen technique, that crosses the surgical ligatures to help force the rotator cuff back into its natural spot, or "footprint." 'We've been trying to improve the strength of the repair and get the tendon to heal to the bone more completely. This technique involves putting in a second row of anchors to attach the tendon the bone," he explains. "Orthopedic surgeons have always done this suture technique open, but I've developed a way to do it arthoscopically, which hasn't been done before."
