A world-first clinical trial is showing promising signs in the treatment of tennis elbow, an injury that affects tens of thousands of adult Australians. The trial involves taking patients' healthy cells, growing them in a lab, and injecting them back into damaged tendons, with the results surprising both patients and surgeons.
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00:00 Keen mountaineer Annette Skirker embraces the difficulties that come with scaling heights
00:07 around the world.
00:09 But her adventures were put on ice when she sustained a seemingly minor elbow injury during
00:14 an expedition in Greenland in 2016.
00:17 When I got home it was really quite severe.
00:21 I had trouble chopping vegetables, I couldn't hold a toothbrush in that hand to brush my
00:28 teeth.
00:29 She had a nose with tennis elbow and waited two years in vain for it to heal.
00:34 After considering surgery which only had a 50% success rate, Miss Skirker opted instead
00:40 to join a world first trial and couldn't believe the results.
00:45 Anything at all is possible again and it has surprised me.
00:51 The procedure takes the healthy knee tendon cells from the patient and grows them in a
00:56 lab in Perth.
00:58 And once we have enough volume we're then able to have an ultrasound guided injection
01:04 where we're actually injecting the patient's own cells back into the tendon body and it's
01:09 those cells that then start to reform new tendon.
01:13 As much as 3% of Australia's adult population suffers from tennis elbow, ranging from slight
01:19 discomfort to serious life altering pain.
01:23 But the newly released results of the trial are encouraging to surgeons.
01:28 They're at their wits end and they come to me requesting surgery and the ability to give
01:32 them an alternative has been a real breakthrough I think in this problem.
01:38 Even today I still am surprised by how everything is so back to normal that I can still do everything
01:47 and then some.
01:48 A welcome relief.
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