Orthopaedic Consortium Awards $200,000 Research Grant for Advancing Orthopaedic Treatments and Innovations

The Arthroscopy Association of North America (AANA), in collaboration with the American Orthopaedic Society for Sports Medicine (AOSSM) and the Society for Military Orthopaedic Surgeons (SOMOS), recently announced an exciting new $200,000 grant funding opportunity aimed at advancing research in orthopaedics, with special focus on the military and general populations. This grant, funded by the AANA Military Advanced Surgical Training Program (MAST), promises to catalyze substantial progress and significant advancements in orthopaedic treatments and techniques.

AANA President and AOSSM committee member John M. Tokish, MD, understands the importance of discovering important findings in this area as a practicing surgeon and colonel in the U.S. Army Reserves. His passion for research spawned the development of this opportunity, and collaboration with other important orthopaedic organizations dedicated to sports medicine and treating the military athlete, AOSSM and SOMOS, helped turn the initiative from concept to reality.

In a meeting held in early November, in Denver, Colorado, the organizations’ leadership convened to evaluate numerous grant applications ranging from a biologics biorepository to the utilization of virtual reality for advanced arthroscopic skills training to force plate analysis for shoulder instability, and more. Proposals were sought to focus on any population, subset or demographic with research pertaining to pre-clinical or clinical research that aimed to improve orthopaedic treatment, techniques, and/or populations within the outlined initiatives. Proposals submitted aligned with one or more of the key initiative areas: biologics, surgical skills development, facilitating the return to sport or duty and enhancing patient-reported outcomes.

AANA, AOSSM and SOMOS are honored to announce the $200,000 research grant recipient is Andrew J. Sheean, MD from the Brooke Army Medical Center and his study, Defining the Impact of General Mental Health, Resilience, and Pain Catastrophizing on Return to Duty and Clinical Outcomes After ACL Reconstruction. This initiative stood out and earned attention by checking the boxes of several important areas. This study seeks to uncover new, modifiable risk factors that predict worse outcomes of ACLR and dimmish the likelihood of parents’ returning to the pre-injury level of activity. As such, the proposed work seeks to improve military medical readiness and enhance Warfighter lethality. This will be the first study of its kind to describe the overall effect of these psychological traits on functional improvement after ACLR. Moreover, considering that there is strong evidence supporting the fact that resilience can be improved through targeted intervention the current study has the potential to identify a novel, modifiable risk factor for patients’ inability to return to their pre-injury level of function. In doing so, this effort has the potential to justify future interventional trials aimed at modulating these patient-specific factors, and therefore, directly affect rates of full recovery from ACLR.

AANA, AOSSM and SOMOS congratulate Dr. Sheean and are pleased to support such an important initiative with critical research grant funding.