Therapist Unlimited Blog

Plug as a potential cure for damaged knees are now being closely studied by a group of medical experts in the United States.
According to a medical report investigators from Hospital for Special Surgery have shown that a biodegradable scaffold or plug can be used to treat patients with damaged knee cartilage.
It is said that the study is unique in that it used serial magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and newer quantitative T2 mapping to examine how the plug incorporated itself into the knee.
Dr. Asheesh Bedi, M.D., a fellow in sports medicine and shoulder surgery at Hospital for Special Surgery who participated in the research said the data has been encouraging to support further evaluation of this synthetic scaffold as a cartilage repair technique.
Bedi revealed the Trufit plug has been designed to have mechanical properties that are similar to cartilage and bone.
He said damage to so-called articular cartilage can occur in various ways, ranging from direct trauma in a motor vehicle accident to a noncontact, pivoting event on the soccer field.
The added articular cartilage lacks the intrinsic properties of healing.

If proven to be an effective cure, biodegradable scaffold or plug could bring joy to those patients suffering from damaged knees.

The medical expert explained if left untreated, these injuries can increase loads placed on the remaining intact cartilage and increase the risk of progression to degenerative arthritis.
Bedi said one way to treat patients with symptomatic chondral lesions is an OATS procedure, in which cartilage is transferred from one portion of the knee to treat another.
To make the procedure for beneficial to the patient, he and his team made the study to examine whether they could use a biodegradable plug, the Trufit CB plug, to fill the donor site.
He revealed the goal was to monitor how the plug incorporated itself into the knee and to evaluate the quality of the repair cartilage.
According to medical facts, the Trufit plug has two layers.
The top layer has properties similar to cartilage and the lower layer has properties similar to bone.
The bilayered structure has mechanical properties that approximately match the adjacent cartilage and bone.
Surgeons inserted the plug in the knees of 26 patients with donor lesions from OATS procedures and followed up with imaging studies (with MRI and T2-mapping) at various intervals for a period of 39 months.
Bedi said so far the result of their study is encouraging since the plug demonstrated a predictable process of maturation on imaging studies that paralleled the biology of their incorporation.,
He added with increasing postoperative duration, the repair tissue demonstrated encouraging properties with T2-values that resembled native articular cartilage.
Furthermore, Bedi and his team believe that there is a role for scaffold-based cartilage repair strategies in the treatment of symptomatic cartilage lesions.
Bedi and the other researchers hope thy can successfully treat these cartilage problems over the long term, thus restoring normal knee function and slowing the progression of knee arthritis.