Have you ever thought to replace your knee with a tissue in your nose? Well, as we know most of the skeleton of a new born baby is of cartilage. There are three different types of cartilage, and depending on the function that each organ in our body is doing, it can have one or combination of these types of cartilage.
Our knee joint is consisted of the junction of three bones ( Femur (upper leg), Tibia (lower leg) and Patella (kneecap)), and some different ligaments (bone to bone connectors), and different type of cartilages.
The Knee Joint.
Articular cartilage is a type of Hyaline cartilage. Image Credit: orthoinfo
Knee Joint,
Three Bones of the knee joint. Image Credit: kidport
Articular cartilage (type of Hyaline cartilage: cartilage with glossy appearance) prevents the two bony surfaces of Tibia and Femur to be in direct contact with each other. Different factors such as age, autoimmune disease (when our own immune system attack different organ of our body, in this case the joint), or sport injury can damage and destroy the articular cartilage in the knee joint.
Damaged knee Cartilage. In this picture the Patella bone is not been shown. Image credit: chiropractic-books
In consequence, a harder tissue, which does not have the functionality of the cartilage, will replace it, so the person will suffer a lot and will be in sever pain. Until recent years the treatments were mostly drug therapy (anti inflammatory drugs and pain killers), and artificial joint (Knee Replacement Surgery). However, none of these methods can solve the problem completely, and the patients will have limited functioning in their joint the rest of their lives. About two years ago, some scientist decided to try a new treatment method; in this method, they cut part of the nose cartilage, which has the same characteristics of the knee cartilage, grew it outside of the body, then grafted it to the knee joint. This was done in some animals like goats first, and recently was tested on human which has had satisfactory results. I think this treatment can help many patients to back to their normal lives with no pain. As a result, the patients will not need the pain-killer drugs. Therefore, they can not only save money by not spending it for the drugs , but also can prevent the long-term side effects of the drugs on their bodies. It can also decrease the cost of health care system and save tax payers’ money.
