Patellar Tendon Load Progression during Rehabilitation Exercises: Implications for the Treatment of Patellar Tendon Injuries

<h3><strong>Purpose </strong></h3><p>To evaluate patellar tendon loading profiles (loading index, based on loading peak, loading impulse, and loading rate) of rehabilitation exercises to develop clinical guidelines to incrementally increase the rate and magnitude of patellar tendon loading during rehabilitation.</p><h3><strong>Methods </strong></h3><p>Twenty healthy adults (10 females/10 males, 25.9 ± 5.7 years) performed 35 rehabilitation exercises, including different variations of squats, lunge, jumps, hops, landings, running, and sports specific tasks. Kinematic and kinetic data were collected and a patellar tendon loading index was determined for each exercise using a weighted sum of loading peak, loading rate, and cumulative loading impulse. Then, the exercises were ranked, according to the loading index, into tier 1 (loading index≤0.33), tier 2 (0.33 < loading index<0.66), and tier 3 (loading index≥0.66).</p><h3><strong>Results </strong></h3><p>The single-leg decline squat showed the highest loading index (0.747). Other tier 3 exercises included single-leg forward hop (0.666), single-leg countermovement jump (0.711), and running cut (0.725). The Spanish squat was categorized as a tier 2 exercise (0.563), as was running (0.612), double-leg countermovement jump (0.610), single-leg drop vertical jump (0.599), single-leg full squat (0.580), double-leg drop vertical jump (0.563), lunge (0.471), double-leg full squat (0.428), single-leg 60° squat (0.411), and the Bulgarian squat (0.406). Tier 1 exercises included 20 cm step up (0.187), 20 cm step down (0.288), 30 cm step up (0.321), and double-leg 60° squat (0.224).</p><h3><strong>Conclusions </strong></h3><p>Three patellar tendon loading tiers were established based on a combination of loading peak, loading impulse, and loading rate. Clinicians may use these loading tiers as a guide to progressively increase patellar tendon loading during the rehabilitation of patients with patellar tendon disorders and after anterior cruciate ligament reconstruction using the bone patellar tendon bone graft.</p&gt

The generation and utilization of a cancer-oriented representation of the human transcriptome by using expressed sequence tags.

Whereas genome sequencing defines the genetic potential of an organism, transcript sequencing defines the utilization of this potential and links the genome with most areas of biology. To exploit the information within the human genome in the fight against cancer, we have deposited some two million expressed sequence tags (ESTs) from human tumors and their corresponding normal tissues in the public databases. The data currently define approximately 23,500 genes, of which only approximately 1,250 are still represented only by ESTs. Examination of the EST coverage of known cancer-related (CR) genes reveals that <1% do not have corresponding ESTs, indicating that the representation of genes associated with commonly studied tumors is high. The careful recording of the origin of all ESTs we have produced has enabled detailed definition of where the genes they represent are expressed in the human body. More than 100,000 ESTs are available for seven tissues, indicating a surprising variability of gene usage that has led to the discovery of a significant number of genes with restricted expression, and that may thus be therapeutically useful. The ESTs also reveal novel nonsynonymous germline variants (although the one-pass nature of the data necessitates careful validation) and many alternatively spliced transcripts. Although widely exploited by the scientific community, vindicating our totally open source policy, the EST data generated still provide extensive information that remains to be systematically explored, and that may further facilitate progress toward both the understanding and treatment of human cancers