Diagnosing and treating acute hamstring injuries

This is a podcast by Dr Robert-Jan de Vos, sports physician in the Erasmus Medical Centre in the Netherlands, with Guustaaf Reurink, who is a registrar in Sports medicine in the Netherlands and is currently finishing his thesis on diagnosis and treatment of acute hamstring injuries. Recently, he published a paper in the New England Journal of Medicine about the role of Platelet-rich Plasma (PRP) treatment for acute hamstring injuries (http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc1402340). We start with discussing this interesting study, which did not show a benefit of PRP injections in acute hamstring injuries. Dr Reurink expresses the methods and results of this study and possible explanations for these findings are debated. Dr Reurink also performed a number of studies on the value of clinical tests and Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) in acute hamstring injuries. Previously, he already showed that most MRIs are still abnormal when the athlete already returned to gameplay (http://bjsm.bmj.com/content/early/2013/11/19/bjsports-2013-092450.abstract?eaf).

We close by discussing the role of MRI and standardised clinical tests as a predictor of time to return to play and re-injury.