Conor McGregor has recently shared a series of social media update on his progress after breaking his leg during his fight with Dustin Poirier at UFC 264 and undergoing surgery. One of his tweets included a series of images of his treatment, including one shot of an MRI. In a new YouTube video analyzing the photo—a T2 image of McGregor’s ankle—orthopedic surgeon David Abbasi, MD finds some inconsistencies with the fighter’s assertion that he had a stress fracture in his leg prior to the fight.
“The problem is when you zoom in on that MRI, which I did, there is no evidence of a stress fracture to the lower leg, where he in fact did have a fracture,” says Abbasi. “Any type of stress fracture, stress reaction on this T2 image should show up clearly in the bone, it would show up as increased or whitening signal. And so from this one image, you should absolutely be able to see any evidence of stress fracture or stress reaction… If you look at this ankle MRI, it does show that he has some tendonitis to the tibialis anterior, the tendon in the front of the ankle that helps to lift our foot up. And you could also see that he may have some increased whitening or white signal at the ankle joint, where the tibia is meeting the talus…
“We could call something like that a contusion or a stress reaction, and maybe that’s what he was referring to,” he continues. “But this was in a different location than where he actually had his leg fractures. There is no evidence of any stress reaction or stress fractures of the lower tibia… This should have clearly shown something if there was anything brewing in that location… If we were concerned about that from a symptomatic standpoint, we would have ordered a leg MRI, not this ankle MRI.”
Abbasi adds, however, that he can only draw this conclusion based on the one image being shown, and that there may be other scans which corroborate what McGregor has stated publicly.
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