All right, good afternoon, and thank you for the opportunity to present our study looking at clinical outcomes following UCL surgery in two different groups of athletes, both non-throwing athletes and throwing athletes from sports other than baseball. Next slide, please. We have nothing to disclose related to this study. Next slide, please. As the literature has consistently shown, in recent decades, baseball players continue to demonstrate excellent clinical outcomes with a high return to play rate following UCL surgery. The recent development of the novel UCL repair procedure has not changed these excellent outcomes, with outcomes remaining similar between the two procedures as we continue to build on our cohort of UCL repair patients over time. In comparison, there has not been a high-quality study with adequate follow-up that we've seen from a large registry of non-throwing athletes and non-baseball throwing athletes. Next slide, please. So the purpose of this study was to conduct the first large-scale study to evaluate the clinical outcomes, complications, including a return to the OR, and return to play rates for these athletes following UCL surgery. We hypothesized that, in comparison to baseball players, non-baseball throwers and non-throwing athletes would demonstrate similar outcomes. Next slide, please. We have a large elbow registry at Andrew Sports Medicine and Orthopedic Center in Birmingham, Alabama, and we conducted a retrospective analysis going all the way back to June of 2001. We wanted a two-year follow-up, so we closed the enrollment for patients who have been operated on after October of 2019. All patients were operated on at our facility in Birmingham. Next slide, please. We included all active non-throwing athletes and non-baseball throwing athletes who had surgery for UCL pathology with a minimum two-year follow-up. We excluded baseball players, non-athletes at the time of surgery, and injuries to the non-dominant upper extremity. Next slide, please. We have an automated, self-reported patient outcome data system called OBIRD that captured most of this data and also called patients to try to contact all players eligible for inclusion. The patient-reported outcomes that we were interested in included the ASES elbow score, the KJAK shoulder and elbow score, the ASMI return-to-play questionnaire, and complication rates including revision procedures. In addition, we compared outcomes of UCL reconstruction versus UCL repair. We used student T-tests and the Fisher exact test with the standard statistical significance set at P less than 0.05. Next slide, please. Our elbow registry included 4,606 patients for this time period, and after applying our inclusion and exclusion criteria, we had 40 non-throwing athletes and 28 non-baseball throwing athletes who underwent UCL reconstruction or repair. Next slide, please. From the 40 non-throwers, we found 37 for a follow-up of 93%, and of the 28 non-baseball throwers, 23 were contacted for a follow-up in this group of 82%. We then collected all the demographic and outcome data for these patients and compared their clinical outcomes. Next slide, please. This is the demographic data for the 37 non-throwers, showing 28 patients who had UCL repair and 9 who had UCL reconstruction. The most common sports represented were football, gymnastics, and cheerleading. A majority of these patients were high school athletes, representing 70% of the non-thrower cohort. Next slide, please. The clinical outcomes for the non-throwing athletes demonstrated excellent outcomes with 35 out of 37, or 95%, returning to competition at an average time of 7.4 months for UCL repair and 10.0 months for UCL reconstruction patients. Next slide, please. The demographic data for the 23 non-baseball throwers demonstrates 11 athletes who had UCL repair and 12 who had UCL reconstruction. The most common sports for this group included softball, javelin, and football quarterbacks. Again, this was mostly high schoolers who represented 61% of this cohort. Next slide, please. The clinical outcomes for this group were also satisfactory, with 91% returning to competition at an average time of 8.4 months for UCL repair and 10.4 months for UCL reconstruction patients. Next slide, please. We feel that this study is very important as it adds information that was previously not at all known regarding clinical outcomes in non-throwers and non-baseball throwers following UCL reconstruction or repair. Due to the long time window for collection in this study, there are inevitably recall and selection biases as limitations. Also, all of our data is from subjective patient-reported outcomes, which could limit the accuracy of our findings. Next slide, please. But in conclusion, we were pleased with the excellent post-operative outcomes and the high return-to-play rate in non-throwing athletes and non-baseball-throwing athletes following UCL reconstruction or repair. Again, there were no significant differences between UCL repair or reconstruction patients in either group of athletes. Also, this data is not statistically different from the outcome data for baseball players. We hope that this study serves as a foundation for future studies in both non-throwing and non-baseball-throwing athletes. Next slide, please. Thank you to our team in Birmingham for the exceptional registry of patients as well as the infrastructure to analyze the data in a meaningful way. Thank you for your attention. Thank you.

clinical outcomes

UCL surgery

non-throwing athletes

throwing athletes

return to play rates