Me: This post will be my way to combine 4 scientific article all written by Dr. Brighton in trying to see if removed bovine growth plate cartilage chondrocytes can be still be made to proliferate. I wanted to see whether the chondrocytes can possibly be regrown back into cartilage through just cartilage proliferation and possibly adding the right amount and type of growth factor concoction. 

Analysis: In a very recent post I had written I had compared Brighton’s two articles which he in 1983 had shown that capacitative couled elctrical fields applied on epiphyseal plates lead to increased longitudinal growth but later in 1986 another article said that the experiment at 5 V peak to peak didn’t lead to any statistical increases. My conclusion for that post was that it was very strange and I couldn’t resolve why the two experiments reuslts seemed to contradict each other. 

Brighton and his collaborators took these chondrocytes from growth plates found in newborn calf costochondral junctions and put them in a monolayer. The monolayer was subjected to a capacitvely coupled electrical field for 2 days and the additon of compounds like thymidine, proline, and phosphate were also added to see what would be the result on these compounds in terms of uptake. The signals which were done for a long time had little effect but the signals that were done only for a short time had the highest effect. From the 2nd article,…

“It is concluded that short-term exposure of growth plate chondrocytes to an appropriate capacitively coupled field stimulates cAMP production, but longer-term application of the electrical field is ineffective.”

This seems to agree with the old articles. in the 2nd study done, those rabbits had their legs subjected to electrical fields constantly for 6 weeks. In the first study, those rabbits only had their plates subjected for 2-4 days.

From the 1st article…”We conclude that the biologic response of cells in vitro is signal specific, and that the total amount of electrical energy required to stimulate the growth plate chondrocyte to increased proliferation is very small since the total time the 0.25% duty cycle signal was only 3.6 min of a 24-h period.”

From the 3rd article, Brighton concludes that…“articular cartilage chondrocytes grown in pellet form can be stimulated to increase glycosaminoglycan synthesis or to increase cell proliferation by an appropriate capacitively coupled electrical field. The importance of the serum concentration in the medium in evaluation of biosynthesis in vitro is noted.” What is very important to note is that the higher voltage did nothing but the lower voltages had a dramatic affect on the thymidine and sulfate uptake 

From the 4th article, it shows that the researchers had taken bovine chondrocytes from growth plates and made pellets from them. They applied the same type of capacitively coupled electrical field and and showed almost the same results as in article 3. It was noted that anything past 30 minutes of application seemed to have a diminishing effect on proliferation. The cAMP levels increased significantly from the 200-1000 V peak to peak signals. 

Here are the big takeaways from it. If you use the electrical field for too long, it ruins the effects. If you use the field at too high of a voltage, it also ruins the effect. You want to keep any application and use of the signal generator at a short and low intensity level for maximum effect.

From source link HERE

J Orthop Res. 1989;7(5):759-65.

Proliferative and synthetic response of bovine growth plate chondrocytes to various capacitively coupled electrical fields.