This article is more than 5 years old. Information may no longer be current.
Inflammation may be crucial for healing damaged muscle tissue
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts
Inflammation may help heal damaged muscle tissue, according to the results of a study recently published in the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology Journal.
The research suggests that muscle inflammation after acute muscle injury might be essential to muscle repair by means of insulin-like growth factor-1 (IGF-1). The findings have implications that could change how sports injuries involving muscle tissue are treated, as well as how much patient monitoring is necessary when anti-inflammatory drugs are prescribed for an extended duration.
“We hope that our findings stimulate further research to dissect different roles played by tissue inflammation in clinical settings, so we can utilize the positive effects and control the negative effects of tissue inflammation,” Lan Zhou, MD, PhD, an investigator for the study, stated in a press release.
Zhou and his colleagues studied two groups of mice; one group of normal mice and a second group which was genetically altered so that they could not mount inflammatory responses to acute injury. Each group was subjected to muscle injury by barium chloride. The injuries in the genetically altered mice did not heal, while those in the unaltered group healed normally.
Zhou and his colleagues found that the presence of macrophages in acute muscle injury produced a high level of IGF-1, which significantly increases the rate of muscle regeneration. Inflammatory cells, the research indicated, produced the highest levels of IGF-1 — improving muscle repair.
Reference:
Lu H, Huang D, Saederup N, et al. Macrophages recruited via CCR2 produce insulin-like growth factor-1 to repair acute skeletal muscle injury. FASEB J. doi:10.1096/fj.10-171579.
Follow ORTHOSuperSite.com
on Twitter