| Summary: | 碩士 === 義守大學 === 生物醫學工程學系 === 102 === Damage of articular cartilage of human is hard to self-repair. Physical stimulation, such as electrical, ultrasound or fluid shear could be used for promoting chondrocytes self-repairing. In research on ultrasound stimulation mostly high frequency ultrasound is used. In previous, work low frequency ultrasound stimulation of various intensities on chondrocytes resulted to that ultrasound stimulation can increase chondrocyte GAG excretion. The most significant effect was at the power of 100mW.
In our research, we use low frequency ultrasound stimulation as a treatment to a New Zealand White osteoarthritis model to investigate whether the low frequency ultrasound stimulation is effective. We have observed the effect of different ultrasound powers on stimulating the damaged cartilage. In addition, hyaluronic acid nanoparticles were used to explore their effectiveness on self-repair and regeneration of cartilage when combined with ultrasound stimulation.
Experiments using normal chondrocytes stimulated with ultrasound validated that the use of ultrasound to stimulate chondrocytes can increase the cell GAG and DNA content expression. Then ultrasound therapy was applied on degenerative arthritis in animal model experiments. The animals were divided into two groups. The first group used only low-frequency low intensity ultrasound to stimulate the cartilage defects, where the second group had ultrasound combined with hyaluronic acid nanoparticles. For the animal model New Zealand White rabbits were used. The animals’ knee cruciate ligament and meniscus were surgically removed which resulted to increased friction and finally degenerative arthritis.
The ultrasound stimulation frequency was 32.8 kHz. The powers used on the transducer were 30mW, 100mW and 200mW. The ultrasound stimulation was applied 20 minutes per day for a physical stimulation of two weeks, four weeks and eight weeks. Stained seices of the defect areas show that ultrasound and ultrasound combined with hyaluronic acid nanoparticles. Resulted to cartilage defect repair better than the Control group. The evidence shows that low frequency ultrasound of 100mW can promote the regeneration of chondrocytes. The ultrasound combined with hyaluronic acid nanoparticles group, it shows more effective repair of degenerative arthritis.
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