Healthy Colorado: Local doctor sees success with new knee surgery technology
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (KRDO) -- An ACL tear is one of the most common knee injuries, especially in a state full of skiers. But now, there's a different option to repair and preserve it.
Skiing is a way of life for Matt McCarthy. But like so many skiers, a bad fall led to a knee injury last January.
"MRI showed a bucket handle meniscus tear as well as a partial MCL and full ACL tear," says Matt McCarthy.
ACL tears are common athletic knee injuries affecting over 200,000 people annually in the United States, according to the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons. The current standard of care is a reconstruction to create a new ACL using patellar, quadriceps, or hamstring tendons. While the results work well for most patients, this involves harvesting the graft from elsewhere in the knee and drilling tunnels through the bone. It's a pretty invasive procedure.
"That recovery time is pretty tough, usually a year, maybe 15 months depending on how PT and surgery goes. And there can be way more complications," says McCarthy.
McCarthy hurt his knee during a ski trip in Jackson Hole. But he's from south Denver, and his dad found Dr. Sean Kelly in Colorado Springs who specializes in new knee surgery technology.
"That new collagen implant called the BEAR will allow your body to actually form that clot within the knee so that you can heal the ACL and it will repair itself without actually needing a new grafted tissue," says Dr. Sean Kelly, an orthopedic surgeon.
Here's how it works. It's a bridge-enhanced ACL restoration, using a special collagen scaffold to help the injured ligament heal. Designed initially in Boston, it has been researched extensively over the past 10+ years and was approved by the FDA for patients over the age of 14 in 2020, and it's been growing in popularity ever since.
"This looks more promising and potentially less arthritis overtime for the replacement," says Patrick McCarthy, Matt's dad. "And we had seen, his brother like you mentioned go through the traditional and taken the hamstring and it took him about a year and a half with rehab. And the rehab stats were really what was most impressive when we considered this."
Matt's dad, Patrick, was hopeful this would be a faster recovery, and it was.
"I still will tell patients that getting back to twisting, pivoting and cutting sports, more high energy sports, skiing and things like that, that it may still take 9-12 months to get back to that," said Dr. Kelly. "But what we are starting to see is there are folks that are actually being ready to do those things a little quicker than 9-12 months."
Six months after surgery, Matt passed his first return to sport test and was recovered and strong.
"Clearly ahead of schedule because typically they expected at least a year," says McCarthy. "But that put me right around the 9-month mark and I was cleared to ski to start the season. And I have almost 30 days under my belt already, and feeling awesome."
Dr. Kelly says his team has done the most BEAR procedures in the entire country, with many patients coming from out of state for the surgery. And in the last few years, he's seen more patients who are good candidates for the BEAR choose that procedure instead of the traditional graft. If you have poor tissue quality, it might not be the best ACL repair for you, and the standard repair might be a better fit depending on how your ligament looks after injury.
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