[HN Gopher] Bone tissue reparation using coral and marine sponges
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       Bone tissue reparation using coral and marine sponges
        
       Author : alexandrehtrb
       Score  : 133 points
       Date   : 2024-07-04 23:42 UTC (23 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (web.stanford.edu)
 (TXT) w3m dump (web.stanford.edu)
        
       | warmedcookie wrote:
       | Part of the crew. Part of the ship.
        
       | hinkley wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | Scoundreller wrote:
         | I uhhh, don't think oocyte is the right word. Osteoblast maybe?
        
           | 77pt77 wrote:
           | definitely not oocyte
        
           | jlund-molfese wrote:
           | OP probably meant to type osteocyte and it got autocorrected
           | to something else
        
             | shiroiushi wrote:
             | Autocorrect is one of the biggest misnomers in all of
             | history, I think; in fact, it's downright Orwellian. It
             | should be called "auto-incorrect".
        
               | yieldcrv wrote:
               | generative grammar
        
               | TeMPOraL wrote:
               | Right. It's all fun and games until it decides to
               | "correct" drug names in your doctor's notes.
        
               | WilTimSon wrote:
               | I highly doubt software that doctors use for patient
               | notes and prescriptions would even have the option to
               | enable autocorrect. If it does, that's a giant oversight
               | on the devs' part.
        
               | hinkley wrote:
               | I've seen some dumb shit in my days. But I'm glad you
               | still see good in the world.
        
               | TeMPOraL wrote:
               | Global autoincorrect in MacOS supposedly did that in
               | recent years, according to some post by Scott Alexander I
               | read a while ago.
        
               | hinkley wrote:
               | If I could find the motherfucker who replaces "its" with
               | "it's" every goddamned time I mean its, his mother
               | fucking days would be over.
        
               | throwway120385 wrote:
               | We should also defenestrate whoever corrects the previous
               | word or phrase based on what you just typed in iOS. The
               | amount of times I've meant something very technical or
               | specific to a field that a programmer in silicon valley
               | has never heard of and then had that corrected to
               | something else totally meaningless by the second or third
               | word is an infuriating waste of time.
        
               | 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
               | That behavior is so infuriating! Especially since I
               | frequently fail to notice it because I am focused on the
               | current word, not the one I had already confirmed as
               | correct.
        
             | hinkley wrote:
             | Typing on phone, late at night. Always a gamble.
        
           | throwup238 wrote:
           | This is why I don't eat out.
        
             | hinkley wrote:
             | I already made the "dead people in my mouth" comment so I
             | can't exactly fault you for this. But someone else can!
        
         | hinkley wrote:
         | Yes, that was supposed to be "osteocyte" but it's far too late
         | now.
        
       | tuatoru wrote:
       | "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".
        
         | ImHereToVote wrote:
         | OP is Scandinavian.
        
           | tuatoru wrote:
           | Yes, but OP is using a word and phrase taken directly from
           | the introduction to the article. I expect better from
           | Stanford.edu.
        
             | viciousvoxel wrote:
             | It's not a major error -- the words are etymological
             | siblings and it's clear what was meant. Repair translates
             | to something resembling "reparation" in most romance
             | languages so it's an easy translation mistake to make.
        
               | hinkley wrote:
               | I worked recently with a guy who learned all of his big
               | words from books. Very, very old books.
               | 
               | It was exhausting. And English is my first language. I
               | felt sorry for my Indian coworkers. Jesus man, stop
               | trying to look smart and just talk like a normal person.
               | The intelligence is in the ideas not the words used to
               | convey them.
        
               | elric wrote:
               | > Jesus man, stop trying to look smart and just talk like
               | a normal person.
               | 
               | What is normal to one person may not be normal to
               | another. Especially when someone learns a language from
               | books without much human interaction.
        
         | HPsquared wrote:
         | It is in Wiktionary as an archaic usage. It makes sense, I
         | think, just an uncommon usage. Singular Vs plural.
        
       | entropyie wrote:
       | 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
        
         | skhr0680 wrote:
         | Frontpage 2002 or 2003 to be exact. I didn't know that it A)
         | lasted that long and B) used that much CSS
        
       | db48x wrote:
       | s/reparation/repair/g
        
       | birriel wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | Luc wrote:
         | This interested me, but I had to look up some of it:
         | 
         | Zygomatic bone: cheeck bone,
         | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zygomatic_bone
         | 
         | Orbital gaps: hollow areas around the eyes
         | 
         | Mandible: lower jaw, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandible
         | 
         | Resorption: a process in which a substance is lost by being
         | destroyed and then absorbed by the body.
         | 
         | HA: hyaluronic acid
        
           | dustypotato wrote:
           | Thank you. I thought i was dumb
        
           | utensil4778 wrote:
           | For anyone else wondering: your body is continually pulling
           | calcium from your bones for metabolic processes. Usually it
           | gets replaced when you consume something with calcium in it.
           | 
           | It makes sense to have somewhere to store extra nutrients so
           | you can keep functioning for a long time between taking in
           | those specific nutrients again.
           | 
           | Your body does this with a lot of your organs. Fat is
           | obviously calorie storage, but muscles can also be resorbed
           | for energy under starvation conditions (or just when they're
           | under used). Your kidneys can resorb water from stored urine,
           | and your intestines pull most water out of what you consume.
           | Most neurotransmitters and hormones get recycled at various
           | rates and turned into new molecules.
           | 
           | I'm sure there's more, but that's all I know of offhand.
        
         | Xenoamorphous wrote:
         | And what be done about bone density? I guess exercise would
         | help but not with the bones in the head?
        
           | amelius wrote:
           | From [1]:
           | 
           | > Animal and human studies suggest that high-frequency, low-
           | magnitude vibration therapy improves bone strength by
           | increasing bone formation and decreasing bone resorption.
           | 
           | So you could apply vibration to the head bones. Not sure
           | about any side effects.
           | 
           | [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4458848/
        
             | arghwhat wrote:
             | Before you apply vibrations to your skull, note that it
             | contains other things than bones that might be less
             | thrilled about said vibrations.
             | 
             | Or more thrilled, who knows - be careful out there, and if
             | you do something stupid, take notes and share the results
             | for our entertainment^W learning!
        
               | amelius wrote:
               | Well, I apply a vibrating device to my skull every
               | morning and evening (indirectly).
               | 
               | It's my electric toothbrush :)
        
               | elric wrote:
               | Indeed. Wasn't there an article just a few days ago about
               | Navy Seals (?) suffering brain injury from being too
               | close to artillery being fired or some such? The
               | vibrations in the skull were thought to be the culprit.
        
             | hinkley wrote:
             | I have been getting ads lately for an aerobic step with a
             | vibrating motor built into it, for this very purpose. It
             | might have been on Peacock, and if so it was during Tour de
             | France footage.
             | 
             | It's a small effect but real, and it's passive from the
             | patient's standpoint and we always seem to find that to be
             | a selling point. This research was, if I recall, originally
             | done for NASA and studied sheep. Shake a Sheep for Science!
        
             | lemonberry wrote:
             | Humming?? No mention of bone density in this article, but
             | there may be some benefits: https://theconversation.com/is-
             | humming-healthy-mmm-heres-wha...
        
             | aszantu wrote:
             | vibration does something, secret tip for migraines is
             | massage wand to the face, almost as good as using it in
             | other places
        
             | smallerize wrote:
             | You can get a concussion pretty rapidly from vibrating your
             | head.
             | 
             | https://twitter.runhello.com/mcclure111/status/837481339989
             | 3...
             | 
             | https://twitter.runhello.com/mcclure111/status/110880835115
             | 0...
        
           | arthur2e5 wrote:
           | resistance training is indeed the recommendation for non-head
           | bones, if you're looking for a confirmation:
           | 
           | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6279907/
        
           | User23 wrote:
           | Bone density is definitely an adaption from resistance
           | exercise.
           | 
           | I don't know any specific studies, but I would expect that
           | the bone density improvements are in some sense systemic in
           | that the metabolic changes that increase bone density will
           | have spillover effects to bones not directly involved in some
           | given movement.
        
           | elric wrote:
           | Regarding the jaw bones: chewing. And keeping your teeth
           | healthy: missing teeth can result in loss of bone density.
        
       | hggh wrote:
       | (2014) [0]
       | 
       | [0]
       | https://web.archive.org/web/20141013021330/https://web.stanf...
        
         | jwilk wrote:
         | (2005) according to the HTTP headers:                 Last-
         | Modified: Fri, 09 Dec 2005 22:37:30 GMT
        
           | whizzter wrote:
           | These kinds of ideas to use stem-cells with foreign materials
           | seemed in vogue back then, no idea how feasible they are in
           | reality but an improvised similar technique for tracheae was
           | how Paolo Macchiarini first got hyped and then convicted (He
           | went on to try it on humans despite skipping animal trials of
           | the technique).
           | 
           | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paolo_Macchiarini
        
             | hinkley wrote:
             | > Macchiarini was convicted of unethically performing
             | experimental surgeries, even on relatively healthy
             | patients, resulting in fatalities for seven of the eight
             | patients who received one of his synthetic trachea
             | transplants.
             | 
             | Fuuuuck. I think I heard about this guy before he went mad
             | scientist, but not after.
        
               | whizzter wrote:
               | Yeah, the early hopeful news spread widely but the
               | scandal and fallout certainly kept things in the news
               | over here for a long time.
               | 
               | There's a Netflix pop-documentary called "Bad Surgeon"
               | with a that does cover the viewpoint of the colleagues
               | that turned whistleblowers (and the persecution they
               | endured before media and prosecutors started looking into
               | it) even if much of the focus is on his many concurrent
               | women (the main one believing she's going to be wed by
               | the pope).
        
       | nonameiguess wrote:
       | 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.
        
       | failrate wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | alexandrehtrb wrote:
         | That's very interesting! Good to hear it!
        
         | Izikiel43 wrote:
         | So you have a sea thumb?
        
       | spondylosaurus wrote:
       | 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!
        
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