Serum levels of hyaluronic acid and chondroitin sulfate as a non-invasive method to evaluate healing after cartilage repair procedures 英文参考文献.docVIP

Available online /content/11/4/118 Editorial Serum levels of hyaluronic acid and chondroitin sulfate as a non-invasive method to evaluate healing after cartilage repair procedures Andreas H Gomoll Department of Orthopedic Surgery, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, 75 Francis Street, Boston, MA 02115, USA Corresponding author: Andreas H Gomoll, agomoll@ Published: 3 July 2009 Arthritis Research Therapy 2009, 11:118 (doi:10.1186/ar2730) This article is online at /content/11/4/118 ? 2009 BioMed Central Ltd See related research by Nganvongpanit et al., /content/11/3/R78 Abstract articular surfaces, including microfracture, osteochondral autografting, and ACI. Progress in the field of cartilage repair has been impeded in part by the relative lack of adequate instruments to evaluate the quality of the reparative tissue. While histological evaluation is desirable, researchers have found it difficult to recruit patients for a second surgical procedure to harvest a tissue biopsy solely for research purposes. Imaging techniques, especially magnetic reso- nance imaging (MRI), have made significant progress in recent years. Certain cartilage-specific techniques such as delayed gadolinium-enhanced MRI of cartilage (dGEMRIC) and T1-rho and T2-mapping have promise to assess tissue quality by indirectly measuring glycosaminoglycan content [3,4]. However, these techniques are associated with sub- stantial cost and potential risk to the patient from contrast exposure; therefore, the development of alternative non- invasive techniques is desirable. In particular, blood tests, which could be repeated multiple times with minimal dis- comfort to the patient, would present an ideal method to investigate the maturation of repair tissue after cartilage repair. Beyond the scientific benefit