Bone tissue reparation using coral and marine sponges | Hacker News Reader

Bone tissue reparation using coral and marine sponges

web.stanford.edu

141 pointsalexandrehtrb65 comments

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.

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

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.

Thank you. I thought i was dumb

And what be done about bone density? I guess exercise would help but not with the bones in the head?

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/

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!

Well, I apply a vibrating device to my skull every morning and evening (indirectly).

It's my electric toothbrush :)

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.

That was shockwaves that damages brain tissue as it passes through it. Dont try to use a jackhammer as bone vibrator.

Humming?? No mention of bone density in this article, but there may be some benefits: https://theconversation.com/is-humming-healthy-mmm-heres-wha...

You can get a concussion pretty rapidly from vibrating your head.

https://twitter.runhello.com/mcclure111/status/8374813399893...

https://twitter.runhello.com/mcclure111/status/1108808351150...

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!

vibration does something, secret tip for migraines is massage wand to the face, almost as good as using it in other places

Driving motorbikes?

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/

Regarding the jaw bones: chewing. And keeping your teeth healthy: missing teeth can result in loss of bone density.

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.

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

Frontpage 2002 or 2003 to be exact. I didn't know that it A) lasted that long and B) used that much CSS

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.

Yes, that was supposed to be “osteocyte” but it’s far too late now.

I uhhh, don’t think oocyte is the right word. Osteoblast maybe?

This is why I don't eat out.

I already made the “dead people in my mouth” comment so I can’t exactly fault you for this. But someone else can!

OP probably meant to type osteocyte and it got autocorrected to something else

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".

Right. It's all fun and games until it decides to "correct" drug names in your doctor's notes.

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.

Global autoincorrect in MacOS supposedly did that in recent years, according to some post by Scott Alexander I read a while ago.

I’ve seen some dumb shit in my days. But I’m glad you still see good in the world.

generative grammar

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.

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.

When you go back and fix it. And it corrects it again.

Flames. On the sides of my face.

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.

Oh how about autocorrect just having less words than a decent dictionary. Today autocorrect tried to convince me reciprocal wasn’t a word and that I wanted reciprocate. When and why did autocorrect / auto suggest / grammar all get conflated, especially outside of phones? When did merely uncommon usage become incorrect? It’s a small but rather constant annoyance and it really is Orwellian

I hate to brake it to you, but its a problem in more ways than just that.

Typing on phone, late at night. Always a gamble.

definitely not oocyte

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.

That's very interesting! Good to hear it!

So you have a sea thumb?

Haha, no, the porous coral was quickly infiltrated and deposited with actual bone. It still gives me trouble now and again (that bone has a goofy bend in it and is weaker than before), but is mostly indistinguishable from some other bone breaks I have had.

*reposited

Part of the crew. Part of the ship.

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.

(2014) [0]

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20141013021330/https://web.stanf...

(2005) according to the HTTP headers:

  Last-Modified: Fri, 09 Dec 2005 22:37:30 GMT

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

> 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.

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).

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!

"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".

It is in Wiktionary as an archaic usage. It makes sense, I think, just an uncommon usage. Singular Vs plural.

OP is Scandinavian.

Yes, but OP is using a word and phrase taken directly from the introduction to the article. I expect better from Stanford.edu.

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.

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.

I remember scott adams (in his heyday) saying this (use of dense or superliterary words that require extra processing) often happens when you don't have an argument and you want to divert attention from the argument to the words themselves.

Often, if you substitute the haughty words for more speedily parseable ones, you realise the argument falls apart, if there was one at all.

It might be simpler than that. Let me remind you all of how erudite I am. I am very smart, I had this idea, and I would like to share it with you, because smart people have smart ideas. Remember, I am very smart. Here’s my idea.

Some of the dumbest, or rather the most dangerous, ideas I’ve heard came from smart people. Lots of dumb ideas come from someone who isn’t in danger of bringing them to fruition. The Smart Guy is imminently in danger of doing so. Or I suppose rather that we are in imminent danger of him doing so.

> 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.

When that person is in their early 20's that's a fair assessment. When that person has been in industry for 20 years, it is not.

s/reparation/repair/g

shame, the original title alludes to a far juicier article!

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