Tracing the Growth and Wasting of Skeletal Muscle and Tendon in Health and Disease
- Based in the School of Sport and Service Management
- Supervisors: Dr Peter Watt, Dr Nick Webborn and Dr Mara Cercignani
Application deadline is 4pm, 27 June 2013
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Injuries from everyday events, exercise and sports are common occurrences and affect people of all ages and activity levels and ages. Musculoskeletal disorders are the most common cause of chronic disability with a high cost for treatment, often requiring extended periods of treatment or therapy. These factors place a significant cost on the NHS and society as a whole and attempts to address. Often the diagnosis and treatment regimes are unable to specifically assign precisely the source of discomfort or injury and methods for assessing severity and recovery are sometimes objectively measured. Understanding the structural properties of muscles and tendons as they progress through a rehabilitation programme will give a much greater understanding of the functional/structural relationship for optimising rehabilitation programmes.
The project will develop a research programme aimed at improving the diagnosis, understanding and treatment of muscle injury and tendon diseases using novel minimally and non-invasive methods to measure tissue integrity and mechanical properties at rest and under controlled stress. This has been made possible by the development of ultrasound and elastography, equipment can image and determine the stiffness/resistivity of tendons, muscles and other related structures without their removal from the body or the need for invasive procedures.
This project will aim to develop a better understanding of the consequences of exercise, training, overtraining, injury and therapies on the time course of muscle and tendon anatomy and mechanical properties (active and passive forces) using isokinetic dynamometry, isometric force production, passive stiffness and ultrasonography combined with elastography. In particular we will aim to ask research questions such as:
What is the optimum ‘dose’ of exercise for improving the structural properties of tendons in a rehabilitation programme?
How effective are different types of exercise in altering the structural and functional properties of muscle and tendon?
References
Mette Bisgaard Andersen, Jessica Pingel, Michael Kjær, and Henning Langberg. Interleukin-6: a growth factor stimulating collagen synthesis in human tendon. J.Appl. Physiol 2011: 110: 1549–1554
Pingel J et al. Local biochemical and morphological differences in human Achilles tendinopathy: a case control study. BMC Musculoskeletal Disorders 2012: 13:53
