Fatal cardiac arrests, football injuries and artificial pitches: An Italian perspective.


A young Malaysian woman who is a hard core football fan now writes for Forza Italian Football while studying in the United Kingdom.

I dont have much information about Keshika Subbarao for now but I can say that this eager young Malaysian is moving up in the footballing world as indicated by her twitters and the interviews she has done.

Just yesterday, she sent me the exclusive interview to me and have taken the liberality to publish on my blog. 

In the below interview, find out what the Italian FA thinks about on the pitch fatal cardiac arrests, football injuries and the role of artificial pitches on those injuries.



Exclusive: Forza Italian Football Sits Down With Fabrizio Tencone, Juventus’ Chief Medical Officer


The Isokinetic Medical Group, a FIFA Medical Centre of Excellence hosted the 22nd Annual Sports Rehabilitation conference on footballers’ muscle and tendon injuries and which took place on 20 – 21st April, at the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre, Westminster, London.
 the Chief Medical Officer of  and Director of Isokinetic Turin attended the conference and Forza Italian Football managed to sit down for an interview with Italy’s leading Sports Medicine expert.

What are the changes that have been made in Italian Football afterPiermario Morosini incident last year?( Morosini suffered a fatal cardiac arrest episode on the pitch during a match between Pescara and Livorno in 2012)
One of the main changes that have been made is the formation of an official panel of experts working together with Italian federation of cardiology and Italian federation of sports medicine to improve the medical aspect of football. There has also been a requirement that each field is equipped with defibrillator.
Defibrillator is the most important device when it comes to saving a person.  We know today that if we have defibrillator it can save a person and such incident can happen to anyone therefore it is important.  Italian Sports Association is trying to improve this by bringing in new rule where every pitch has to have defibrillators near the bench.
Do you think anything could have been done differently in regards to the Morosini incident at that time?
Currently there is an ongoing inquest regarding the incident so I can’t comment on it.
Is there any link between playing football at a young age and the injuries that are acquired when playing football as an adult?
Every previous injury a player had can be a risk factor for injuries in the future. So if you had an injury while playing football at a young age, that kind of injury and healing of that injury can be a huge risk factor for new injury when you’re older, especially injuries relating to muscle because muscles do not heal normally.
Muscles get scars and if you had a lot of muscle injuries when you are young, then you will have a lot of scars on the muscle and that makes the muscles less flexible and elastic compared to before, therefore it can be risk factor. Some Injuries are different when you are young and old. When a person is young they are still growing and some parts of the body are not completely attached to the other part, which makes them more fragile.
How do you feel about Juventus elimination after losing to Bayern Munich?
I am sad. They (Bayern Munich) were much stronger than us both in Munich and Italy.  There was a great difference between Juventus and Bayern Munich. There is no excuse for Juventus.  At the moment, and only for the moment, Bayern Munich are the stronger team.
Is playing on astro turf or artificial pitch harmful to the players?
A lot of scientific studies are being carried out at the moment to study artificial turf but it could not be determined whether or not artificial pitch is a bad thing. In the centre and south part of Italy, the weather is not ideal for the growth of good grass and it is very dry. Therefore it is better to have artificial turf compared to nothing at all.
It cannot be said for certain whether artificial pitch increase the rate of injury or not. It is difficult to analyse this as every few years there is a new type of artificial turf emerging quality and it changes in terms of absorption efficiency and so on making it difficult to compare them.
For example, 10 years ago artificial turf was very bad and it was possible injuries were increased due to that back then but now the artificial turf are almost similar to grass so there is no difference. UEFA are doing lot of studies on this topic as well. But maybe there is no much difference between artificial and real pitch.
Dr Fabrizio Tencone began working with Juventus early on as one of their doctors, before becoming their First Team Doctor in 1995. During his time in this role, he accumulated more than 400 pitch-side appearances on the bench for the team – a record at the time. Dr Tencone still plays a major role with Juventus, acting as their Head of Medical Services since 2010.
Note: 
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1 comment:

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