Time to change gloves?

Surgical gloves

How often do surgical gloves fail? The picture (cc) is by A.Currell

Even though minor rifts in surgical gloves happen every now and then most surgeons don’t think too much about them. A study by Carter et al. indicate that we probably should be more worried: we miss to detect about 2/3  of the perforations. In 80 % of the cases we also failed to acknowledge that also the inner glove was perforated. Not surprisingly the surgeon had the highest rate of perforations, between 4-9 %, relating to procedure difficulty. Continue reading

How hard can it be – just glue some cartilage onto the bone (part IV)

It's nice to see some real orthopaedic rocket science

It’s nice to see some real orthopaedic rocket science. The picture (cc) is by Calsidyrose

It is rare to see long term follow-up studies ( > 5 years) and Bentley et al’s randomized controlled study on cartilage defects is therefore a rare bird! They randomized 1 00 consecutive patients to chondrocyte transplantation or mosaicplasty. After 10 years they were able to follow-up 94 % of all patients – a truly amazing accomplishment!

The method for chondrocyte transplantation was “simple”: harvest a few chondrocytes from the knee, grow them in a dish and the reinsert them and cover it up with a piece of tissue so that the cells don’t escape. I guess growing the cells requires a lot of expertise but apart from that no fancy gadgets were needed. Continue reading

How hard can it be – just glue some cartilage onto the bone (part III)

A picture of jello

A picture of jello – not really like the NeoCart-jello but it’s a cool picture. The picture (cc) is by Amayzun

Today’s blog is about gluing cartilage onto trauma-caused joint cartilage defects. Crawford et al report a new treatment option where they grow chondrocytes, attach them to a soft jelly (collagen matrix) and then glue it onto the defect! They randomized 21 to the NeoCart jelly and 9 patients to standard microfracturing and followed them for 2 years. Continue reading