Pooja H Chainani, Patrick M Williamson, Diana Yeritsyan, Kaveh Momenzadeh, Nadim Kheir, Joseph P DeAngelis, Arun J Ramappa, Ara Nazarian
Tendinopathy is a chronic tendon condition that results in pain and loss of function and is caused by repeated overload of the tendon and limited recovery time. This protocol describes a testing system that cyclically applies mechanical loads via passive dorsiflexion to the rat Achilles tendon. The custom-written code consists of pre- and post-cyclic loading measurements to assess the effects of the loading protocol along with the feedback control-based cyclic fatigue loading regimen. We used 25 Sprague-Dawley rats for this study, with 5 rats per group receiving either 500, 1,000, 2,000, 3,600, or 7,200 cycles of fatigue loads...
March 1, 2024: Journal of Visualized Experiments: JoVE