Treatment Of Articular Cartilage Defect With Biological Osteochondral Xenogenic Graft Transplantation: An Experimental Study

ObjectiveIn 1743 Hunter stated,"From Hippocrates to the now,it is universally allowed that ulcerated cartilage is a troublesome thing and that,once destroyed,is not repaired." Following the pacing steps of modern society and aging population,the defects of articular cartilage significantly increased because of surgical trauma and cataplasia.The articular cartilage lesions incidence rated to 5%,and even up to 22%during the definite crowd such as athletes,reported by foreign scholar.Curl reported the results of arthroscopy of knee that about 63%patient existed the lesions of cartilage. The articular cartilage sorts to hyaline cartilage which do not have blood supply,drainage of lymph and innervation.The chondrocyte is a heightly differentiated histiocyte,and it is finite to be repaired following the cartilage injured because of the limited fissionability of ripe chondrocyte of the joint.How to repair the damaged articular cartilage become more and more important.Although transplantation of autologous osteochondral and tissue engineering chondrocyte had been carried out in clinical,it was limited with many factors.In order to observe the different effects between the treatment of osteochondral xenogenic transplantation and allograft transplantation,we carried out this experiment to approach that whether the technique of osteochondral xenogenic transplantation could be one of the ways to repaired the defects of articular cartilage.Material and methodThe biotype of osteochondral xenogenic grafts were made of donator of femoral articular surface of pigs' knee joints,which shaped to this size: the diameter of 4.5mm and length of 10mm.We used these grafts to repair the goat' s lesions of articular cartilage.We randomly divided the goats into two groups:the control group was made up with the osteochondral allograft, another was the experimental group and used the technique of press and match the grafts to fit the articular surface at the defects of femoral trochlea and condylus medialis femoris of the goat to repair the lesions.We killed the goat after 16 and 32weeks,observed the shape of the grafts in gross and the pathological section with microscope,and scored the results with the method of Wakitani.ResultLimping could be obviously observed during 5 days after the operation while it was going to release gradually and the ranges of the operated knee turned well.In 16^th and 32^nd week,we could see the lesions covered by fibroid tissue in gross;some cartilage of the grafts turned yellow and demarcation surrounding the grafts could be observed.The lesions of the control group were covered by the grafts in gross and with microscope.The grades of Wakitani between two groups analyzed by statistics prompted that the repaired effects of control group was better than experimental group with significant different (P＜0.05).Definite immunological rejection had not been discovered during both groups and periods.ConclusionThe effects of cartilage lesions repaired by the biological osteochondral xenogenic graft were different from the allogeneic transplantation,the control group was better.Definite immunological rejection had not been discovered during both groups and periods.