Where there was once a lack of data on the cause of elbow injuries leading to a proliferation of Major League Baseball pitchers undergoing Tommy John surgery, the MLB conducted the first collaborative study on the matter, and this season five teams and MLB are leading a larger-scale effort to find the root of the injury, reports NJ.com.
Every first-year pitcher taken in the 2014 draft from five teams will be involved in an estimated five-year study in collaboration with MLB and the American Sports Medicine Institute lead by James Andrews, MD. The study will analyze pitchers' biomechanics, anatomy and flexibility to identify risk factors that may make the player more susceptible to elbow injuries than others, according to the report.
The report also notes that Jeff Dugas, MD, an orthopedic surgeon at Andrews Sports Medicine & Orthopaedic Center is performing a new operation to torn ulnar collateral ligaments that potentially can reduce the recovery time for pitchers by at least six months. The procedure uses collagen-dipped super-tape attached to the ends of the ligament and the bone with an anchor to repair the UCL after a tear.
"They get to us because they can't pitch and they can't throw. Are we doing too much of an operation — the same operation — we're doing one operation for all different pathologies," Dr. Dugas told NJ.com. "We've got full thickness tears that are having Tommy John surgery and we've got guys with partial thickness tears that are having Tommy John surgery and everything in between. So we started thinking about maybe we're doing too much surgery for some of the ones we've seen. And is it possible to repair what's there?"