Holly Sidell

You hear a pop in your knee as you pivot or stop fast. Your knee swells. It is painful to bear weight. Maybe you are limping, or your knee is unstable. For an athlete or anyone who is active, injuring the ACL - whether a sprain, partial tear, or full rupture - can be devastating. When can you return to sport? And will your skill and ability be the same when you do?

“I think there are only a few certainties in life: death, taxes, and if you remove the meniscus, you will have arthritis,” says Aaron Krych, M.D., orthopedic surgeon, Mayo Clinic Orthopedics and Sports Medicine. With such a strong statement, it is no surprise that the Knee Meniscus Specialty Clinic is pioneering, and using, technology and techniques to preserve and repair, rather than remove, the meniscus.

You don’t have to be a professional athlete to suffer from knee cartilage injuries, but you still deserve to be treated like one. At Mayo’s Knee Cartilage Specialty Clinic, patients benefit from access not only to the world’s leading experts and researchers on cartilage injuries, but also from new techniques in the area of orthobiologics, regenerative medicine, and restoration surgeries - whatever your professional or activity status.

Hip impingement is a very common condition; in fact, many people suffer from hip or groin pain and pulls for years, not knowing it is hip impingement causing the flare-ups and symptoms. “Hip impingement can be misdiagnosed because when people present with hip pain, it's typically in the groin and sometimes in the buttock,” explains Bruce Levy, M.D., orthopedic surgeon, Mayo Clinic Orthopedics and Sports Medicine, Professor, Department of Orthopedic Surgery at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.

It's a common misconception that only baseball pitchers, tennis players and golfers injure their rotator cuffs. Rotator cuff injuries are one of the most common causes of shoulder pain affecting active people, generally caused by gradual wear and tear of the tendon tissues.

As a parent, it can be concerning to see your young athlete suffering from, and complaining about, hip pain. Whether present from birth, or due to your child’s growth plates still being open as they develop, the two most common causes of hip pain we see at our clinic in children and young adults are hip dysplasia and hip impingement.

RECLAIM, (REcycled CartiLage Auto/Allo Implantation), is a one-stage arthroscopic knee cartilage restoration procedure in clinical trials at Mayo Clinic – one of the few places in the world to offer it. This outpatient procedure, currently available to trial participants only, uses regenerative medicine; damaged tissues and cells removed from the patient’s knee during debridement are digested down to the micron level and allogenic signaling cells from Mayo’s donor bank are added. These signaling cells stimulate cartilage regeneration in a faster manner, helping the cartilage grow. After 45 minutes to an hour, those cells are then replanted into the knee, and patients are generally able to return to normal activities in three to four months.

“As a general rule, we're quite conservative here at Mayo. We'll always try non-operative treatments that have documented success before jumping into the operating room,” says Bruce Levy, M.D., orthopedic surgeon, Mayo Clinic Orthopedics and Sports Medicine, Professor, Department of Orthopedic Surgery at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.

A knee cartilage injury can lead to swelling of the knee, pain, tenderness, locking, and limited movement, whether through acute damage or wear and tear over time as part of osteoarthritis. Suffering such an injury can keep you sidelined… will you ever return to sport?

Having such an injury, or defect in cartilage, can be likened to having a pothole in the road. Treatments, therefore, aim to essentially, “fix a hole in a cartilage defect like you would fix a pothole in the asphalt,” explains Daniel Saris, M.D., Ph.D., orthopedic surgeon, Mayo Clinic Orthopedics and Sports Medicine.