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There's Now an Artificial Cartilage Gel Strong Enough to Work in Knees:
"We set out to make the first hydrogel that has the mechanical properties of cartilage," says chemist Ben Wiley from Duke University.
A significant number of people could benefit from something like this, as more than 790,000 knee replacements happen in the US every year. Currently those replacements - which involve pretty invasive surgery - may only last for a couple of decades before they need to be replaced again.
[...] As with other hydrogels, the main ingredients in this new material are water-absorbing polymers: in this case one polymer made of spaghetti-like strands, intertwined with another polymer that's less flexible and more basket-like. A third polymer, made of cellulose fibres, acts as a mesh holding everything together.
When the material is stretched, it's the third polymer that keeps the gel intact. When it's squeezed, polymers one and two – with negative charges running along their length – repel each other and stick to water, so the original shape can be restored.
The hydrogel passed with top marks in both these crucial categories – stretching and squishing – and showed better performance than other existing hydrogels. In one test of 100,000 repeated pulls, the artificial cartilage held up as well as the porous titanium material used in bone implants.
Journal Reference:
Feichen Yang, Jiacheng Zhao, William J. Koshut, et al. A Synthetic Hydrogel Composite with the Mechanical Behavior and Durability of Cartilage, Advanced Functional Materials (DOI: 10.1002/adfm.202003451)
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 06 2020, @02:43PM
I'm in my 60s and know many people a little older than me that have had knee replacements. Sometimes they don't work and require extra surgery, and as a previous post noted the recovery can take awhile (meanwhile, whatever muscle tone you had is fading away during recovery).
A Buffalo NY area surgeon has worked out a method of knee *repair* that works in some cases where the underlying bones are in good shape. The inventor was trained as a dentist and did some "technology transfer" to work out how to remove a little bit of the bone surface(s) and put in a plastic inlay (similar to dental "drilling" and filling). This is minimally invasive, no bones are cut off, and recovery is relatively fast.
Here's one of many sites that gives a brief overview,
http://www.midsouthorthopedics.com/orthopedic-qaa/77-knee-pain/1036-what-is-the-repicci-procedure.html [midsouthorthopedics.com] The process was developed by Dr. Repicci and some of his family are also involved. It's available around the USA and possibly elsewhere.
I have several friends with knee repair who are extremely pleased with the results. I also know of one person who waited too long and didn't qualify for the repair surgery (bone faces were not strong). This might sound like a Soyvertizement, but I have no connection to Repicci, only the friends that are satisfied customers.