The collaborative Human Performance Center
now on the Rice campus is the next iteration of a lab that
we've had within the Department of Orthopedics
for many years. This space is a place where we can do
really unique research, where we're looking at either
recovering from injury or injury prevention. [music] The center will provide a really unique opportunity to advance
within the field of human performance analysis and biomechanics analysis. [music]
[sound of baseball hitting soft wall] The fac
t that we can do it
all in one space and the fact that we can adapt the center to utilize our space
and to apply the technology to so many different applications. It's a really great opportunity to take the clinical expertise
and the research expertise that we have and collaborate with people
in pretty much any department. We're very good at Houston Methodist
at taking care of medical patients and understanding medical research,
but leveraging our partnership with Rice where we get computer scie
nce,
engineering, kinesiology, allows us to broaden
the scope of the things that we can study. And we have ongoing lines of studies
that have affected the world of sports medicine
and joint replacement. One particular line of research
is with blood flow restriction. We've actually done a lot of research
with blood flow restriction therapy. We have several publications
and we've had the opportunity to use a lot of different technologies in research
and developing the different protocols. And the
really unique thing about that
research is we've been able to see the direct transition of that technology
and the outcomes of our research into clinical practice. How does partially restricting blood flow and oxygen delivery
to a muscle while it's contracting mimic high intensity exercise? Stimulus was thought
to really be taking place down the limb. We're actually occluding blood flow. So we did a study where we literally had
adults come in for eight weeks, just general population and do rotat
or
cuff training twice a week with us. Under upper extremity
blood flow restriction, and we had a group that did it with
and went to a group that did it without. We showed that
the group that was doing this with blood flow restriction gained more muscle mass and more strength and endurance
in their rotator cuff and shoulder. And so what we find
is that you can exercise under conditions of partial blood flow restriction
to an extremity at very low loads, very low workloads,
and get a somewhat sim
ilar effect as if somebody was operating
at high intensity, high workloads. The advantage for that, for say, a patient who's just had surgery
and can't load a limb very well yet, it allows us to provide a stimulus
that might help them prevent atrophy and loss of function
and accelerate return to function. Based on the success of our validating the use of blood flow
restriction training in high performing athletes, that has now become standard of care
in our physical therapy centers throughout th
e system
so that we can get them a better result in a shorter amount of time. [music]
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