“…Indeed, in vitro experimental studies have demonstrated that loss of homeostatic tendon strain can produce a pattern of catabolic gene expression [5,[33][34][35][36]41], apoptosis [3,17], and degenerative histological changes [5,21] similar to those seen in clinical cases of tendinopathy [1,2,5,19,24,26,28,30,31,38,39,40,45,50,54,60,61]. However, the effect of these catabolic changes on the subsequent mechanoresponsiveness of tendon cells is unknown.…”