Posted on 09/10/2010 9:09:01 PM PDT by cakid1
UC Davis Doctor grows new fingertip.
I have never heard of this before.
Back in January Deepa Kulkarni had the tip of her finger cut-off when a car door slammed into her hand.
The tip of her pinky was on the ground.
Some time later she found Dr. Malathi Srinivasan at the University of California-Davis Medical Center.
The idea of 'tissue regeneration' is new.
"The therapy involved cleaning out the finger and removing scar tissue -- a process called debridement - and then dipping her finger into MatriStem wound powder."
Pretty awesome.
Not a lot of info in the article.
Interesting...I know (fortunately, not from experience) that infants can do this until they are a year old or so. I wonder if the process described here is potentially dangerous (possible mutations/cancer?).
MatriStem didn’t work as good for John Bobbitt
According to wikipedia, the regeneration of finger tips is not unheard of, especially in children: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regeneration_%28biology%29
Still, pretty exciting. Unfortunately it’s too late for John Bobbitt...
I canoed in to Shoshone Lake in Yellowstone National Park one time and sliced off about a quarter of the pad of my left index finger while slicing cheese in camp. Actually, the piece was hanging by the slightest tag, so I bandaged it in the hope it would heal. But, the bandage and subsequent versions didn't do the job, so I finally just pulled off the pad and accepted the fact I'd have a deformed finger.
I was surprised that the finger healed pretty well. At first I just had a finger pad with a flat spot on it with a scar in the middle. Today, I have a normal finger -- it completely regenerated. I kept thinking I had a lizard tail finger. I can't even see a scar today; I butchered the finger maybe 25 summers ago.
The take-home lesson is: Be careful when you cut the cheese in the wilderness. And, don't worry too much about losing a fingertip.
This isn’t the first time this has been done. I first saw a case where a man had regrown a fingertip with this same process, about a year ago.
Apparently, it’s a real medical technology.
Ouch..
:)
Every cell in your body gets replaced every 7 years, many such as liver cells are replaced much faster.
I just had to go there.
Very interesting stuff.
At around the age of 16, I sliced off the tip of my thumb (no bone but a big slab of flesh) while stripping insulation off of some speaker wire. After a few weeks, it completely healed.
My brother did that when he was three or so. Knocked off the whole top of his finger. It grew back. My son, who was 15 at the time, sliced off most of the top of his forefinger and fingernail, almost to the bone, about 18 months ago and it grew back fine.
I have to add, we wanted to stick the sliced-off portion of his finger back on but the dogs ate it. The horrifyingly bloody house was very clean when we came home from the ER that evening. Dogs! Gotta love ‘em.
The substance is called “extracellular matrix”.
It has been used to grow sheets of tissue (from the patients themselves) to entirely reconstruct peoples bladders whoe have lost them due to bladder cancer, etc.
I think I read something about a guy who’s ear got cut off, and they used this stuff to grow him a new ear.
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