Metabolic diseases and tendinopathies: the missing link

The “Metabolic diseases and tendinopathies: the missing link” Forum, organized by IBSA Foundation in collaboration with ISMULT, was held on Saturday 21 June 2014 at the Auditorium of the Università della Svizzera italiana of Lugano, precisely to stimulate researchers to investigate the relationships between metabolic diseases, often subclinical and therefore not easily diagnosed, and alterations of the extracellular matrix in the tendon, tendinopathies. University students, researchers and medical specialists, about 150 members of the scientific community worldwide, have had the opportunity to compare themselves with respect to what, even today, is a pathology that profoundly alters the quality of life of millions of people but remains obscure in the causes and in the healing process.

Prof. Nicola Maffulli, Professor at the Faculty of Medicine and Surgery of the University of Salerno and Queen Mary University of London, opened the meeting. He underlined how, despite a series of hypotheses, there are still countless totally unknown factors acting on the tendons; recently there has been a lot of talk about the genetics of tendinopathies: there is no doubt that some people have inherited genes, or gene variants, that predispose to these diseases but the great prevalence of diseases and metabolic disorders has led, in recent years, to study possible connections between metabolic problems and musculoskeletal system diseases.