Annie Lefley Case

Some important past research conducted by other people includes the creator of the project, Annie Lefley. Annie created this project to see how much tension is put on the patellar tendon when grande pile or a demi pile, two moves in ballet. She used the mechanical model, which resembled a knee, featuring the hip, the patella, the femur, and the tibia/fibula. Also included in the model, is a guitar string and a guitar tuning mechanism. These resemble the ligaments in the knee. Whenever you turn the tuning mechanism it will move the knee while putting tension on it as it bends.
Our projects history came from Annie Lefley’s science fair project, from 2007. She performed as a ballet and when she was doing her grande piles (in which the knee is
almost fully bent) she noticed that they tend to put more strain on her knees than the technique demi piles (where the knee is only partially bent.) These dance techniques are just like deep knee bends and half knee bends.
The sources we interviewed for our projects included Dr.
Andrew Waligora, M.D, he replaces knees and hips at GPOA, PT Tom McConnell, physical therapist at GPOA in Moon Township, MPT Dan Primm, major physical therapist at Greater Pittsburgh Physical therapy in Cranberry Township, and PTA Megan Brelloch, which is the physical therapist assistant to MPT Dan Primm. The first question that we asked Dr. Waligora was “how can anyone try to prevent knee pains, problems, or injuries, overall?” His answer was “doing simple exercises like, correct form while jumping and running. Also ACL, PCL, and MCL prevention classes help make the knee, hip, calf, and glute stronger. To help prevent interior knee injuries while doing specific exercises. Our next question to him was “what age would it be harmful to have a knee surgery performed at?” His response was “it depends on the injury/surgery procedure. If there was an open growth plate the procedure could not be done or done differently to try and avoid the growth plate area if the surgery was not elective due to an injury.” Our last question for Dr. Waligora was “what are the most common knee injuries in elders?” His answer was “Soft tissue injuries are very common. Older patients you usually won’t commonly have Meniscal or ACL tears. Quad and patella tendon injuries or degenerative meniscal tears, are common too. A direct fall/injury onto the patella or tibial platue can result in a
fracture.”
Our next source that we interviewed was PT Tom McConnell, physical therapist at GPOA in Moon Township. We asked Mr. McConnell during his interview “what exercises put a lot of strain on the knees and what exercises are bad for your knee?” His response was “the worst exercise for your knees are leg extensions because they put a lot of tension on your ACL” (anterior cruciate ligament) The next question we asked Mr. McConnell was “what is the average recovery time for a knee surgery?” His response was “it depends on the injury. An ACL repair requires a full year recovery, a meniscus requires a three month recovery, and a miniscule transplantation, (which is removing the old meniscus with a new one) requires a one year recovery.
Next, the source we interviewed was MPT Dan Primm, major physical therapist at Greater Pittsburgh Physical therapy in Cranberry Township. The question we asked Mr.Primm was, ”What exercises have you stayed away from for strengthening the knee as the perspective of a physical therapist?’’ His response was, “ I personally stay away from leg extensions like Mr.Mcconnell said before. I think all physical therapists should stay away from this because of all of the stress and you have a slighter chance of injuring your ACL in some way.” The last source that we interviewed was PTA Megan Brelloch, which is the physical therapist assistant to MPT Dan Primm. The question we asked Ms.Brelloch was one of the same questions we asked Mr. Mcconnell, “what are the worst exercises for your knees?” We asked her the same question because we wanted to see the different perspectives of the two PT’s. Her response was, “ The worst exercises in my opinion would be leg extensions like Tom said and also deep squats. If you do an incorrect form of a squat ,not having your knees over your toes or your hips not square. Also going too deep in your squat, for example having pain when your squatting it means you are doing more than you can handle or your form is improper.” Our last question we asked Ms.Brelloch was “What are the sports that cause the most knee injuries?” Her response to us was,” The most athletes that come to our office have injured their knees in soccer, football, hockey, baseball, and softball.”
As our next source was science buddies.com - in which we found our project. Our last source was the Meniscal Transplantation Protocol, given to us by PT Tom McConnell.