Scientists use plastic to help body make new bone!!!!

Scientific research is proceeding at an alarming rate. The new in thing in medical research from the field of orthopedics is the use of plastic to heal fractures and to grow new bones. May sound too good to be true but read on to know more.

Imagine you have a fracture - your leg is broken, and you have a cast and you are asked to wait for a month to get back to normalcy!!!!

Imagine the amount of trauma and agony you would go through!

Now imagine this scenario. If the doctor injects a biodegradable plastic solution into the fracture site and this helps to glue your fractured bony parts and helps you walk in a week and also helps you to regrow the bone sooner! How will this be? Sounds too good to be true? This is what some researchers are trying to achieve at the Rice University, Houston, Texas. Built into the plastic scaffold are proteins called growth factors, which are released as the plastic degrades inside your body.

The proteins help entice blood vessels from the healthy surrounding bone to invade the damaged area, bringing nutrients that the new tissue needs to survive. After a while, all the plastic has safely disintegrated, leaving you with new bone where the fracture once was.

This bone scaffolding is inbuilt with proteins called growth factors, which are released into the body once the plastic disintegrates inside the body. These proteins also help in increasing the blood supply to the affected site and thus the fracture heals faster. The faster healing of the fracture and also the faster growth of the affected bone solve the time consuming problem.

Once the procedure is perfected and the method adopted on a day-to-day basis fracture treatment would become revolutionized. This also has a potential in helping people with painful bone involvement in advanced stages of cancer. If this breakthrough can heal the bony defects sooner and help in regrowth of bone faster, people with cancer spreading to the bones will be spared of a lot of trauma.

Advertisement

This research also opens the possibility of man growing his own spare parts for his body himself inside his system. That day does not seem to be far away.