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Doctors managed to repair knee joint injuries using nasal chondrocyte cartilage tissue.
Doctors have been testing a new way of fixing knee joint injuries by making use of nose cartilages. The advancement of medicine helped doctors build grafts of cartilage tissue. The study was conducted analyzing ten patients. Marcus Mumme, who is MD from the Department of Surgery and the Department of Biomedicine, has stated that the grafts of nasal chondrocyte can generate tissue which is similar in its composition with hyaline cartilage.
These types of procedures were more efficient than those based on injections with autologous joint cartilage’s cells. On October 22, the study was published in the Lancet magazine. After two years have passed, the patients have examined again. Doctors established that in 9 out of 10 patients the repairing of knee joints proved to be successful. The 10th patient suffered another knee injury.
The score for the International Knee Documentation Committee after the evaluation of the knee joint undergone to a subjective patient increased to 75, from 60. The Knee Injury and Osteoarthritis Outcome Score that analyzed symptoms rose from 60 to 80. The clinical improvements which were demonstrated to appear in nasal chondrocyte tissue implant procedures registered a huge success, the knee joint being viable and healthy between 6 and 24 months from the surgery.
After implantation, during the first two years, there were no side effects and no side effects which could concern the biopsy of the septum cartilage. Perhaps more details about the study will help us figure out how this worked. Doctors have enrolled ten patients with ages between 18 and 55 who suffered from injuries on the trochlea or on the femoral condyle that affected the thickness of the cartilage.
The primary goals were safety and feasibility of the surgery. The second important decision was to satisfy the patients, but also to assure the morphological and compositional quality of the repaired knee joint within the first 12 months after the procedure. Researchers thought of using nasal chondrocytes to enhance the previous methods that used the same chondrocytes to heal knee joints.
Doctors have argued that articular chondrocytes, which were firstly used in treating fractured joints, were not as efficient and did not reveal a greater reproducible capacity to produce similar cartilage tissues with the hyaline ones as the nasal chondrocytes did. The articular chondrocytes did not display the same plasticity to adapt as the nasal chondrocytes did.
Image source: public domain
