Musculoskeletal

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News • Osteoarthritis

Cells from cow knee joints used to grow new cartilage tissue

In an effort to develop a method for cartilage tissue engineering, researchers at Umeå University in Sweden successfully used cartilage cells from cow knee joints. By creating a successful method with conditions conducive to growing healthy cartilage tissue, the findings could help lead to a new treatment cure for osteoarthritis using stem cell-based tissue engineering. This is according to a…

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Article • Development

Dynamic braces for kids with scoliosis

Some six million people in the U.S. suffer from scoliosis, a sideways curvature of the spine. These include approximately 2 to 3% of adolescents who are diagnosed each year with idiopathic scoliosis, which is usually identified during puberty and progresses until skeletal maturity. One in 500 children today require treatment using spine braces and 1 in 5,000 need spinal surgery. The typical spine…

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News • Research

Link between diabetes and bone health

Diabetes, which now affects almost 30 million Americans, can cause serious health complications, including heart disease, blindness, kidney failure and lower-extremity amputations. A lesser-known but equally grave complication is the effect of diabetes on bone health.“Clinical trials have revealed a startling elevation in fracture risk in diabetic patients,” says Liyun Wang, associate…

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News • Pediatrics

Spines of boys and girls differ at birth

Looking at measurements of the vertebrae – the series of small bones that make up the spinal column – in newborn children, investigators at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles found that differences between the sexes are present at birth. Results of the study in the August issue of the Journal of Pediatrics, suggest that this difference is evolutionary, allowing the female spine to adapt to the…

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Regeneration in a hostile environment

Damage to the spinal cord rarely heals because the injured nerve cells fail to regenerate. The regrowth of their long nerve fibers is hindered by scar tissue and molecular processes inside the nerves. An international team of researchers led by DZNE scientists in Bonn now reports in Science that help might be on the way from an unexpected quarter: in animal studies, the cancer drug epothilone…

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