00:00This is the Injury Report, presented by NYU Langone Health.
00:05Yankees pitcher Carlos Rodon landed back on the IL with heavy inflammation in the left elbow that he got surgery
00:13on in the offseason and of course caused him to miss the start of the regular season.
00:17So in today's Injury Report, we're speaking with Dr. Julia Iafredi, sports medicine and rehabilitation specialist at NYU Langone because
00:27we have video for you guys of Rodon playing catch for the first time since the injury.
00:33Doc, long time no see. Welcome back to Injury Report.
00:38We got the video playing right now, so let's get straight into this.
00:42So he took the MRI and it revealed that the UCL is intact, so there's some good news there.
00:48But Rodon said that he had been bothered by the elbow on and off for the last couple of weeks.
00:54Two-part question here, Doc.
00:56One, what is exactly going on in the elbow?
00:59And two, could the inflammation be a result of the offseason elbow surgery?
01:05So great question.
01:07Big thing here is that with the MRI, we don't know exactly what they saw on it, but inflammation can
01:13happen in basically any soft tissue.
01:16So it's possible that there was inflammation around his UCL, even if the UCL itself is intact.
01:22Also possible that he had it in the flexor pronator origin, so that tendon that originates off the inside part
01:29of the elbow, that's really important with that throwing mechanism.
01:32And even possibly a little bit of the joint space itself.
01:36As you mentioned, he has this history of surgery.
01:39He had Tommy Johns in 2019.
01:41Then he had this surgery to try to remove some of those loose bodies and the bone spur to be
01:47shaved down.
01:48I don't think that's necessarily causing the inflammation.
01:51I think it's probably just the fact that his biomechanics have maybe shifted a little bit over time.
01:56And now he's seeing that constant tension on the area, causing maybe a little inflammatory response.
02:02So million dollar question here is elbow inflammation common in, I guess, everyday people.
02:09Like, do any of your patients come into your office feeling like Rodon?
02:13And if so, you work with professional athletes around the globe.
02:17How would a regular person's rehab different from Carlos Rodon's?
02:23So, I mean, the issue with inflammation is it can happen with anything, right?
02:28So you get some sort of trauma and an inflammatory process is going to occur.
02:33Now, there's a difference between acute inflammation and chronic inflammation.
02:36Acute inflammation usually happens kind of in three phases.
02:39You get the initial injury, which causes pain.
02:42You get all these macrophages trying to clear out the debris of the damaged tissue.
02:48That's then going to move on into what's called the proliferation phase, where we're trying to get all these healing
02:53growth factors to the area to try to help new collagen get laid down into the tissue.
02:59And then the remodeling phase, which happens over, you know, weeks to months.
03:03And the point of that is we're trying to get that tissue to turn over into the good, healthy collagen
03:09tissue.
03:10That should happen with everyone.
03:12A good rehab program is going to be essential to make sure that it happens in the right order and
03:19progresses in a way that we expect.
03:21The time when inflammation is really problematic is when people have chronic inflammatory responses, meaning their body is not really
03:27able to regulate the amount of inflammation they have going on.
03:30And those are the people that get into trouble and maybe need a little bit more long-term management or
03:36overall care from physicians and from healthcare professionals, because those tissues are not remodeling the way they're supposed to.
03:44And so sometimes we need to kind of help them in the right direction.
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