This episode features Dr. Kim Barber Foss, an athletic trainer and researcher, who discusses her work in "translational research" to improve athlete health. She explores how scientific findings from the lab can be directly applied to clinical care to predict and prevent serious injuries like ACL tears.
Relevant Articles/Media:
Foss, K. D. B., Khoury, J. C., Eisenmann, J. C., & Cappaert, T. A. (2023). Descriptive Epidemiology of Game-Related Youth Flag Football Injuries. Journal of athletic training, 58(11-12), 1004–1009. https://doi.org/10.4085/1062-6050-0427.22
Melissa: Welcome to Behind the Breakthroughs! I'm Melissa Deuber from the Woodruff Health Sciences Center Library. In each edition, we take a closer look at the research shaping health, healing, and human performance at Emory. Today's episode is part of the "Off the Field" series where we explore how science moves from the lab to everyday life.
I'm joined by Dr. Kim Barber Foss to talk about their work, the questions that drive it, and what it could make possible. Let's get started. So, first off, tell me a little bit about you, your research, and how you got into your field.
Dr. Foss: Great. Well, my background is actually as an athletic trainer. So I've been an athletic trainer for 35 years, and I kind of fell into the whole research component. I was working as an athletic trainer at a high school and physical therapy clinic and had an opportunity in Iowa with the National High School Sports Injury Registry. So, something really interesting, jumped into that, and that was in the early 90s. That really fostered my love for injury epidemiology and examining injury rates and trends. That's kind of launched my whole career into research while also still wearing a hat as an athletic trainer.
Melissa: That's great. So, in your definition, what does it mean to be both a clinician and a researcher?
Dr. Foss: Well, in my perspective, being a clinician is someone that's working kind of hands-on with athletes and patients, and then being a researcher is being able to tie that together. So that's what I'm really passionate about: the whole concept of translational research. So, taking what we can do in a lab, but actually having a direct impact on athletes and patients on the sidelines, on the field. So it's making that bridge connection.
Melissa: Okay. So, how can research be used directly in clinical care as someone working with athletes?
Dr. Foss: That's a great question. Really, it's just thinking about something you want to change and having a question and looking at ways to make a change and improvement, you know, looking at patient-reported outcomes, looking at reducing injury risk with your athletes. So, it's taking research that could be out there, even if you're not conducting it yourself, but learning to adapt it, adopt it, or even abandon it and just implement what will make the impact on your patients and your athletes.
So even just reading the literature. You know, I'm a really huge component of clinicians being consumers of research. And so being able to take research that may be done in a lab or by researchers here at Emory or here at SPARC and being able to just understand it and take key tidbits that you can adopt into your clinical practice that can improve your patient outcomes.
Melissa: Great. So, did you have a particular moment or experience that made you curious about sports injuries and recovery?
Dr. Foss: I had quite a few as an athletic trainer, wanting to give my athletes the best and keep them the safest. And that's really kind of what fostered my love of the whole research component too, and especially my focus on injury epidemiology. Because I think, especially as a clinician and a researcher, you have to understand what injuries are occurring so then you know how to maybe implement prevention strategies or being able to identify risk factors so then you can prevent them.
Melissa: Right. So, how has doing this research or your experience changed the way you think about progress, success, or maybe even your own patients?
Dr. Foss: I think it's really helped me be able to be more aware and cognizant of outcomes, and especially being innovative in making change. Especially as an athletic trainer, we're a profession that's built on tradition: you know, the old standby "that's just the way it's always been done". And so I think it's reframing that whole mindset of making meaningful change to impact long-term outcomes.
And that's really what I'm really passionate about, what I try to work with especially younger professionals: is always being curious, always being innovative, always being open to taking research, technology, innovation, because ultimately that's going to make it better for your patients.
Melissa: Right. So, what originally made you curious about predicting the injury as opposed to just treating it after it happens?
Dr. Foss: Well, if you can identify and predict a potential injury, you can prevent it from ever occurring to that athlete. And I think for every injury you can prevent, that's a whole impact on the rest of their life. If you look at ACL injuries, because we spend a lot of work doing research on ACL and biomechanics, if you can identify a risk factor and if you can see that in an athlete and if you can intervene before it occurs to them, you've now saved them a whole lifetime of osteoarthritis, pain, decreased physical activity. And that's just on a single athlete. If you look at being able to predict and reduce injuries and prevent them before they occur, you can make phenomenal change across athletes for their whole life.
Melissa: Absolutely. So, what's something about your work that's more human or maybe more unpredictable than people might expect?
Dr. Foss: I think the big component is just the whole relationship aspect. You know, a lot of researchers...when you say researcher, people get the whole connotation you're sitting in a lab. And with human research that we do, we're hands-on with the patients and the participants and we interact. We build relationships with them because a lot of our projects, we like doing longitudinal research. So, we're going to be following them for a long time to see if our intervention matters.
So, and that's what I really love about, especially here at SPARC and about my world as an athletic trainer, is the relationships that we build. Because ultimately, they are a person; they're not just a research participant and somebody that's just in your lab. So, I think that's the whole human aspect and that's what I really like bringing to our team.
Melissa: That's really great to hear. Yeah. So, thank you, and also thank our audience for joining us for this episode of Behind the Breakthroughs Off the Field. I hope today's conversation offered a clearer look at the curiosity, care, and science behind the work happening at Emory.
If you enjoyed this episode, feel free to explore the rest of the series, where each researcher brings a new perspective on injury prevention and human performance. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next time.