By MASUDUR RAHMAN

Campus Editor

Two research projects that are in their early stages now could lead to healing ligament damage without surgery and to detecting a type of arthritis at early onset.

The projects are a collaboration of two Oakland University professors and several doctors at Beaumont Hospitals, with participation from athletes in OU’s women’s basketball team and women’s swim team.

The two projects are funded by grants from the OU-Beaumont Multidisciplinary Research Awards program.

This grant program is a by-product of the recent partnership between OU and Beaumont in creating the upcoming OU William Beaumont Medical School, said Beaumont’s Dr. Joseph Guettler, who is involved in both of the projects.

Guettler is also an adjunct professor at OU, although he is not currently teaching any classes.

John Reddan, a biology professor at OU, is working with Guettler for the damage-healing project. Yang Xia, a physics professor at OU, is working with Guettler for the arthritis project. Several other Beaumont researchers are also assisting in the projects.

Healing a common injury

The anterior cruciate ligament, or ACL, is one of four ligaments that are critical to the stability of the knee joint. For athletes, damage to the ACL is one of the most common injuries in sports and can lead to knee instability and arthritis.

“It’s almost endemic,” Guettler said of the commonplaceness of ACL tears.

He said there is currently no way to heal ACL tears without surgery, but he and Reddan are trying to see if they can treat the tears with certain growth factors.

Guettler said this project is “in the midst of pilot work.” He said that they’ve so far worked with rabbit models and tested the procedure on three rabbits, and that they will continue testing throughout winter.

He said that if the experiment is successful on the rabbits, they may start testing on humans sometime “conceivably down the road.”

“If we save some people’s need for surgery, that’d be incredible,” he said.

Athletes at risk for arthritis?

The other project’s goal is to observe athlete’s cartilage to detect arthritis at the early stages, as well as to see if high-impact athletes are at risk for developing Osteoarthritis in their knees.

High-impact athletes do a lot of running and jumping in basketball and soccer, for example, whereas low-impact athletes don’t do as much of those activities.

Xia and Guettler both said high-impact athletes usually have damage to their cartilage earlier than other people and that most athletes have pain in their joints by the time they’re in the 30s.

For this research project, OU women’s basketball team is participating as the high-impact group, and OU women’s swim team as the low-impact group.

“When you jump around, you put pressure in the [bone] joints,” Xia said. “If you don’t do exercise, it’s bad for your body. But if you do too much, it’s bad for your body too.”

He said swimming does less damage to people’s bodies because the buoyant force of the water takes away from the hard effects of gravity.

He said they’re trying to look at subtle differences in athletes’ cartilage over time to look for damages as early signs of arthritis. He said that right now nobody knows how to catch this disease at the early stages.

“At the late stage you don’t need a doctor to tell you something’s wrong … you can feel the pain,” he said.

To do this, they are using a relatively new software in a MRI machine at Beaumont Hospital to visualize very early cartilage damage.

Guettler said the research is currently in the preliminary stage, and the new software was installed just last week. They did their first test run last week and are analyzing the gathered data.

If the preliminary tests go well, they hope to bring the athletes in and test them by the end of winter semester, before the teams’ spring season begins.

Xia and Guettler both expect that swim team will have less early cartilage damage than basketball team.

“From [our research results], we could give better recommendations for appropriate training,” Guettler said. “We may conceivably [ask the athletic teams] to include less high impact activities in the training regiment.”