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[simplytoogood]

If someone were to lengthen 5 cm on one segment, either tibias or femurs, would full athletic recovery be possible?

I heard someone on another thread named amatan say this:

"Hard to say so far, but based on patients I met who have done 6 or less cm lengthenings here (most Koreans are very conservative in how much they lengthen in comparison to Westerners, very rarely does anyone lengthen over 6.5cm here), they say they've regained all or pretty close to their previous athletic ability, although I have noticed that the femur patients  as a whole recovered better than the tibia patients.  One patient here who did 6 cm on tibias say his sprint speed for a certain distance I don't remember went from 12.0 seconds to 12.8 after two years post surgery, which I consider a pretty good recovery. Talking to a lot the patients made one trend stick out to me - stick to 6 cm or less if you want to recover very close to your pre-op athletic level.  This is the main reason I decided to stick in the 5-6 cm range rather than go for my original target of 7.5 cm.  

I believe the two cases of precice malfunctions here were more or less freak isolated incidents.  Looking back on it objectively, I would still recommend the precice, the only disadvantage it has is that most doctors do not let you weight bear with it.

Dr. Lee is probably one of the best surgeons in the world for LL.  It's something I've heard a lot of surgeons here say, and he is regarded as possibly the top orthopedic surgeon in the whole of South Korea in LL and deformity correction.  Dr. Paley himself even said that he could not have done a better job with the surgery than Dr. Lee did when he was observing him."

[Medium Drink Of Water]

I think it depends on the type of activity you're going to be doing.  I can still sprint probably as fast as I ever could, but my legs would get tired pretty quickly if I were doing distance running.

[amatan]

But don't take my word for it.

http://www.archives-pmr.org/article/S0003-9993(09)00967-8/fulltext

summary:
*11 patients underwent FEMUR LENGTHENING ONLY and 5 underwent femur AND tibia lengthening using the Ilizarov technique.
*The amounts lengthened total varied from between 2.5 cm and 8.5 cm, with an average of 4.4 cm.  The largest gain for a femurs only patient was 6.6 cm with most doing 3.0-5.0 cm.  It doesn't say specifically how much each person lengthened each segment by for the patients who did two lengthenings, but it's probably safe to assume no particular leg segment was lengthened more than 6.6 cm given ones who did over 6.6cm total were all patients who did femurs and tibias.
*Using a few exercises (sprinting up stairs in a given time, squats performed in a given time, etc), they tested muscle strength among other things. 
*Patients at 6 months post op, 1 year post op, and 2 years post op were tested with these tests, and the patients on average by the 2 year mark were within 3% of their pre-operative strength and ability.     
*No significant correlations were found between recovery and age or between recovery and amount lengthened.  But given what I know about statistics, you cannot reliably discern a significant relation given each subgroup if you look at them by age ranges or lengthening ranges would be only a few people.  Still, 16 is a decent size for a total sample, and based on the measures they used to test their patients, a 97+% total recovery on average is what I call excellent.

There is way too much emphasis naysayers who say you will never make a good recovery put on things as unreliable as internet diaries (single cases, ESPECIALLY popular diaries of atypical cases, people who did completely ridiculous amounts, or with crazy foreign doctors, which of course tend to be read WAY more often) or their own faulty intuition (YOU BREAK YOUR LEGS AND GROW = YOU WILL NEVER BE ABLE TO RUN AGAIN BECAUSE YOU HAVE TO PAY FOR IT SOMEHOW").   

[ForcedPuberty]

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