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: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 06 2020, @05:42AM
Healthy athletes getting their natural cartilage replaced with this just for the gains.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by shortscreen on Monday July 06 2020, @05:42AM (3 children)
So how much would it cost to have some control arm bushings made out of this stuff?
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday July 06 2020, @12:27PM
I foresee problems of contamination and degradation in a control arm application - bits of sand get in and shred the fibrous structures.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 06 2020, @03:42PM (1 child)
If you are going racing, replace with good quality rod ends or sphericals.
The polyurethane kits I've seen make the car noisy (removing the nice rubber isolation). Since the original rubber was balanced in stiffness to give a tradeoff between noise and handling, just stiffening up all the joints with urethane makes a mess of the original. In one case where back-to-back cars were available for a comparison, the original rubber handled better on a test track than the noisy urethane-modified car. Of course ymmv...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 08 2020, @05:32PM
Is the ability to recast replacement parts using the frames of worn out rubber ones for vehicles where getting rubber replacement parts is next to impossible or highly expensive. Outside of that there are better solutions than urethane, although I am blocking on what they are called now.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 06 2020, @10:04AM (11 children)
I find this number ridiculous.
There are 300 million people in the US.
That means that more than one people out of 400 will get a knee replacement a year.
I've never met someone who got their knee replaced. Is it just because I'm under 40, and this doesn't come up in conversations?
(Score: 2) by aiwarrior on Monday July 06 2020, @10:27AM
Well i know plenty of people in Portugal that has had it. Very common, even on people that do not do much sports.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 06 2020, @10:29AM (1 child)
Medical tourism. The US has the best doctors in lots of specialty fields due to a combination of high wages/prestige and the most renowned medical schools. Rich people also like to skip the line in their home countries that have socialized healthcare.
(Score: 2) by fido_dogstoyevsky on Monday July 06 2020, @11:56AM
Which they normally do by paying their doctors themselves while not leaving their home countries with socialised healthcare.
It's NOT a conspiracy... it's a plot.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday July 06 2020, @11:25AM (1 child)
Why, is knee replacement a subject of casual conversation, like the weather is for Brits?
I can't vouch for the first statement of the conjunction but the second one seems quite plausible.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 06 2020, @05:05PM
My grandpa had 3 knee replacements.
The first one had to be re-replaced after a few decades as the summary noted.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by hendrikboom on Monday July 06 2020, @12:00PM (1 child)
I know several people who have had it. They are all older than yo. But I'm in Montreal, where you don't need to be rich to afford it.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Monday July 06 2020, @01:59PM
Maybe not rich, but you do need to be willing to put up with several weeks of pain and restricted mobility. If you've already got pain and restricted mobility, then the cost looks a lot better.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 06 2020, @12:28PM
Each person has two knees, so twice the amount of operations or two per person if you swap both. Then on top of that they don't last very long and need to be replaced eventually. Not sure if it's any of those things but I could at least come up with a few reasonable explanations.
That said I'm intrigued about this. I could really use this as I have one bad knee after a bad fall.
(Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Monday July 06 2020, @01:36PM
Yeah, people in their 40s tend to not have their knee replaced. Once most of your friends are 70, talk of body part replacement becomes much more normal.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 06 2020, @02:57PM
A lot of people have been kneeling on their knee recently, and this support for Black people eventually wears out the knee.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 06 2020, @05:04PM
I'm in my 50s. I have severe osteoarthritis in both knees (side effects of cancer treatment). Doctors say I'll need knee replacements, but won't give them to me now because I'm too young; the replacements would wear out and I'd need another replacement. I offered to die early, but they thought I was joking.
I used to get opioids for the pain, but they don't give me those anymore. On a good day I manage to take the garbage out.
(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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 06 2020, @05:52PM (1 child)
Assuming 100,000 pulls is equivalent to 100,000 steps, then this is only 40-50 miles (65-80km). That is a pretty short test to be making any longevity claims.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 06 2020, @08:28PM
I'm guessing they were very strong pulls that are not humanly possible. And you can still compare the result to titanium or other materials.