Rocek, a family with sport in their DNA: parents were professional athletes, mother played volleyball for the Czech national team and father paddled, the other two children - brother and sister also their twins - sportsmen in football and volleyball. Aisha Rocek, Patrick’s twin sister, will be taking part in the Paris Olympics this summer in the blue team of rowing.
Osteochondral lesions of the ankle (i.e. lesions affecting the articular cartilage and the underlying bone, usually due to trauma), are often treated in a "biological" way in young patients: damaged tissues are regenerated by using the patient's own stem cells.
However, this option is only valid for young patients with a limited size of lesion. Biological cartilage reconstruction is no longer effective, with increasing age, in case of excessively large and deep lesions or failed surgical treatments.
"When we received the video in which she runs on the beach, it was inevitable to superimpose the image to the one before the surgery: her back had one of the most severe deformities I have ever seen" said Alessandro Gasbarrini, director of Oncological and Degenerative Spinal Surgery at the Rizzoli Orthopaedics Institute in Bologna, who operated on V.B. with his team.
She had a 3D printed titanium sternum (the first of its kind in Italy) implanted three years ago at the Rizzoli Orthopaedic Institute and is now the mother of a baby girl, born at the S. Orsola Hospital in Bologna.
An 44-year-old man turned to the Rizzoli-Sicilia Department due to a tetraparesis: a severe compression of the cervical cord caused the paralysis of all four limbs.
A critical situation, making the risk of a complete paralysis plausible. Therefore, he was operated by the director of the 1st Orthopaedic and Traumatologic Clinic, Cesare Faldini, together with the equipe of the department of Bagheria, directed by Giovanni Pignatti.
The happy ending is on his bike, where the story binding him to Bologna began. P.G., 40 year old, is a two-wheelers fan. He has an X-ray showing a scapula injury. At first it seems benign, then the cold shower: osteosarcoma, a rare and aggressive bone tumor.
The Italian reference centre is the Rizzoli Orthopaedic Institute, where P.G. is visited by Giuseppe Bianchi, MD of the Orthopedic Oncologic Clinic, directed by Professor Davide Donati.
He could not grasp objects or fasten buttons. 16 year-old F.'s right arm could not work, having grown deformed after a bad fracture in the pediatric age: at 7, he broke his elbow due to a trauma, the growth cartilage was compromised and developed anarchically, so that the arm rotated progressively, reaching a deviation of 60 degrees. The deformity of the elbow also became a serious aesthetic handicap, difficult to accept with teenage.
For the first time in the world, the ankle of a 9-year-old girl suffering from a very rare form of bone sarcoma was reconstructed with homoplastic bone and an extensible nail at the Regina Margherita Children's Hospital in Turin, by a team of orthopaedic surgeons from the Città della Salute Hospital in Turin and the Rizzoli Orthopaedic Institute in Bologna. Thanks to the surgery, the little patient will be able to walk again. The surgical procedure was performed by a team of orthopaedic surgeons coordinated by Dr.
