Abstract:

BACKGROUND: The cartilage injury is difficult to treat due to its limited self healing ability.
OBJECTIVE: To review the current situation research of arthroidal cartilage injury and repair.
METHODS: The databases of Chinese Biomedical Literature Database, CNKI, China Academic Journals Full-text Database, PubMed, EMbase were retrieved with key words of “arthroidal cartilage injury, arthroidal cartilage repair” for articles published from January 1990 to September 2009. The language was limited to Chinese and English. Papers concerning structure of articular cartilage, mechanism of articular cartilage injury, repairing the articular cartilage injury with articular cartilage transplantation, as well as using tissue engineering methods to regenerate articular cartilage were included.
RESULTS AND CONCLUSION: The traditional cartilage repair methods mainly include subchondral drilling, grinding and micro fracture art, with purpose of mobilizing all the cell proliferation, which has the potential to proliferate cartilage cells, so as to achieve the objective reconstruction. However, the repairing tissues are often fibrocartilage, rather than transparent cartilage. Further degradation and the general problems such as the ossification also exist so general therapeutic effects were poor. In recent years, with the material science, engineering, and cell biology, physics and chemistry disciplines related to the development and cross, new kinds of articular cartilage repair defects, such as cartilage cells transplantation, tissue engineering and gene therapy, is gradually applied.