A research team at the National Taiwan University Hospital’s (NTUH) Yunlin branch recently found that an anti-cholesterol drug may be effective in treating degenerative disc disease — a major cause of back pain.
The team said they removed tissue samples of nucleus pulposus — a jelly-like substance in the middle of the human spinal disc — from six different patients between the ages of 23 and 29 who had recently undergone spinal surgery for herniated lumbar discs.
Researchers then extracted cells from the samples and cultivated them in a laboratory, the team said.
Yang Shu-hua (楊曙華), chief of NTHU Yunlin branch’s Department of Orthopedics, and his colleagues found that after 72 hours of cell cultivation, the number of cells had increased after they added a medicine commonly used to lower cholesterol.
They added the medicine in the hopes of maximizing the expression of collagen II — a protein that makes up movable joints — and minimizing the expression of collagen I — a protein related to fibrosis.
Yang and other researchers also found that the amount of collagen II had increased, while the amount of collagen I had decreased 72 hours after the cultivation began.
“Regeneration of the nucleus pulposus tissue in the early stage of intervertebral disc degeneration [illness] can theoretically retard or even reverse the degenerative process and possibly [help patients] regain a healthy intervertebral disc,” Yang said in the research paper.
The paper was presented at the 55th Annual Meeting of the Orthopedic Research Society in Las Vegas last week.
Another experiment by Yang and his colleagues also found that nucleus pulposus tissue samples of adolescents were more suitable for the aforementioned regeneration process compared to the samples from adults, the team said.
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