Abstract:

BACKGROUND: Avascular necrosis of the femoral head (ANFH) is a world wide difficult controlling diseases. Though many methods are used for treating this disease, there is not an accepted one got precise curative effect. Bone morphogenetic protein (BMP) is an effective osteoinductive factor, which can induce local bone formation, promote necrotic bone repairing if implanted into necrotic region.
OBJECTIVE: To observe the role and mechanism of BMP in the treatment of ANFH, and to summarize the relative research progress.
METHODS: A compute-based research was performed in CNKI and PubMed for articles related to application of BMP in the treatment of ANFH using key words of “femoral head necrosis, bone morphogenetic protein, pathogenesy, and therapy” from January 1995 to April 2010. Relative documents concerning pathogenesis of ANFH, role of BMP, and BMP in the treatment of ANFH were included. The repetitive research or old data were excluded.    
RESULTS AND CONCLUSION: A total of 300 articles were collected and 30 papers were included in the final analysis. BMP not only received definite effects on treating bone fracture and bone defects, but also widely used for the treatment of ANFH, which can basically repair bone defects after removal of necrotic bone. BMP can be used as adjuvant therapy for palliative surgery, such as core decompression, osteotomy, or bone transplantation, which can raise the therapeutic efficacy of traditional surgery.