Bone tissue reparation using coral and marine sponges
From a cosmetic point of view, almost everybody exclusively focuses on the skin to counter aging, when they should be at least as concerned with bone density.
Lots of people have perfect skin, but they still look old. Why? Bone morphology. The zygomatic bone erodes, and the orbital gaps widen. The mandible degrades and pivots down and backwards (jaw rotation). Issues like resorption are currently very challenging. Skin is comparatively much easier. Also (and besides well-known interventions like collagen, retinoids, HA, and dermarolling), Epidermal and Keratinocyte Growth Factors are already very cheap, and showing much promise.
I suspected this page was written in MS FrontPage, and a quick peek at the source code seems to confirm it! I love to see old pages still online. Netscape Composer got me through the 90s/00s
I lost a tooth after the pandemic. To seat an implant they pack the void with one of several things, including sterilized cadaver bone, then wait for the oocytes to colonize and make new bone.
I got a synthetic bone sand. Little bits of it migrated like glass slivers would but otherwise it wasn’t bad and at least I didn’t have dead people in my mouth.
Obviously this is a bit of a different scenario given the fairly substantial differences in the shape of the wound, but I wonder how much longer we will need to use naturally occurring materials versus synthesized ones, made in a sterile environment.
My left thumb was reconstructed with coral fragments about 27 years ago. The bone exploded due to the growth of a benign cyst. 6 weeks in a cast to stabilize, then surgery to scoop out the cyst and replace the material. Then 6 more weeks in a cast. When discussing replacement materials, my doctor offered cadaver graft or self transplant (surgically removing bone from my wrist or hip to build a graft). I was deep into Steve Haworth at the time, who was experimenting with implant materials including coral, so I asked about coral. Without missing a beat, the doctor said they could definitely do that. I asked if it was expensive, and he said no. I asked if it had a high rate of rejection, and he said it was comparable to self transplant.
Why was it not the first suggestion? Why did he not even mention it in the first place? Sadly, I forgot to ask these questions.
Tl;dr I had a coral graft, and it worked great.
Part of the crew. Part of the ship.
It's a shame Nature seems to keep these articles locked up forever. I found the first reference, which is a study from 2000, which is still paywalled and I can't read it. I'd be curious to know how state of the art has changed since this. I had a two level lumbar interbody fusion seven years ago, the procedure in which discs are removed and replaced by metal spacers that get seeded with a bone graft. Within about 18 months, you've got one solid bone. They seeded it with my own bone, sawed off of my pelvis, plus some kind of growth-stimulating protein. Beats me whether that was coral-derived or synthetic or what. I didn't think to ask. In any case, it certainly worked. It takes a while, but x-rays today look ridiculous. The bone is enormous, effectively growing around the original screws and rods that held everything in place while the bone was growing.
I guess the scaffold matrix in me must have been of the coating variety. As far as I was told, the spacers were just the same titanium alloy as the screws and rods, which for some reason don't set off metal detectors, which makes me wonder why nobody makes knives and guns out of the same material.
It'd be nice if they put a date on this page. The other references I could find were from 2011 and 1987.
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I went to school with a kid who got some scoliosis surgery that involved coral but can't remember exactly how. It seemed to go well though!
"Reparation"? That means the act of paying back, making amends, compensating a second party for a wrong done them.
What happened to "repair" as a noun? "Bone tissue repair".
s/reparation/repair/g