HydroGel - A New Way to Heal Knees?
Bad or painful knees are one of the
most common causes of pain in the elderly, and can start at quite an
early age due to extra stress on the cartilage or due to injury. This
damage is rarely healed by the body.
Image: scottchan / freedigitalphotos.net
Part of the reason this damage
doesn't heal well is because the cartilage in the knee gets very little
blood flow, which body parts need to fix problems on a cellular level.
Part of the standard treatment for knee cartilage healing is to make
tiny holes in the area and let the blood pour in to encourage a healing
process.
There are two problems with this
method. The first is that the new tissue rarely replaces all of the
damaged tissue, meaning it is never a complete replacement. The second
is that the space may fill with scar tissue instead of new cartilage,
which isn't really a solution.
But a new method is seeing light
recently, as published in the journal of Translational Medicine,
scientists, including biomedical engineer Jennifer Elisseeff from Johns
Hopkins University. This method proposes the use of a replacement
material, a hydrogel with some special properties.
The gel, which looks a lot like jello
and behaves a lot like it too, is injected into the knee as liquid.
However, once it is exposed to UV light, it hardens, providing a sort of
scaffold for stem cells to attach to and grow on. The way it is built
involves many bindings and criss-crossing fibers, to provide a very
strong and stable structure.
Process of the hydrogel knee treatment
To test this, Elisseeff and team
tried the method on 15 patients. They poured the liquid hydrogel into
the patients' torn cartilage. After that, the surgeons shined the UV
light and hardened the polymers in the gel.
The results were very promising, the
new cartilage filled 86% of the torn area. This was compared to 3
subjects who were treated in the standard way - for them, only 64% of
the torn area was filled.
In addition, the patients who got the hydrogel treatment reported considerably less pain than the control group patients.
At the moment, larger studies are
being held testing this method, but results seem promising, says Farshid
Guilak, an orthopedic surgeon at Duke University, and adds that with
the advance of stem cell treatments, the efficiency of this system will
only grow, as we will be able to use the body's own cells to facilitate
faster growing of cartilage, and get more people out of pain and on
their feet.
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