It is inevitable to live a life free of danger or harm. Often enough, this could occur in a form of a car accident, sports injury, a simple trip down the street.
It
may be nothing severe; but occasionally, you may find paramedics’ attention fast at hand, and before you know it, you’ ll be diagnosed with a bone fracture let alone a few. Nothing to worry about; medicine has the solution! However, if you happen to be an elderly or a metabolic dysfunction patient, or just simply gone through an extreme accident, then you are plain unlucky. Often, these fractures won’ t heal quickly or properly at all. Scientists at the University of Michigan Medical School led a team of investigators who discovered a new protein named jagged1-, capable of substituting currently used bone morphogenetic proteins( BMPs) to promote bone repair.
One step back: Bone healing
To begin with, a bone fracture is a crack in the periosteum of a bone, which is a membrane that surrounds the outer surface of all bones. This causes disruption to blood supply and inherent stability at the site of injury. Immediately, after a fracture occurs, a natural physiological process kicks off to eventually reach the best possible restoration of the bone to its original state. The healing process is initiated with the release of cytokines by macrophages, neutrophils, the degranulation of platelets and damage to soft tissue at site of injury. This quickly triggers an inflammatory response aimed at reducing hematoma and other inflammatory symptoms. This, along with the formation of granulation tissue by fibroblasts, makes up the first step of the healing process— named the inflammation or reactive phase. This is followed by the reparative phase, 6 where precursor cells from the periosteum develop into chondroblasts and osteoblasts. Chondroblasts are required to form new hyaline cartilage, while osteoblasts make woven bone. The named newly formed tissues grow and merge to connect adjacent parts of the fractured bone, forming what is known as fracture callus: containing osteoblasts producing new bone and osteoclasts reabsorbing old bone. As time progresses, the fracture gap is bridged and the bone starts to adopt back its initial strength and stability. This occurs as it undergoes the final and long stage of remodeling, following Wolff’ s law stating that the bone remodels in response to mechanical stress.
Bone morphogenetic proteins( BMPs)
Before we get into the details of the new discoveries being made for complex bone fracture patients, it is wise to clear up the current substitute before