Innovative Nerve Repair Technique Provides More Thorough Recovery

Traumatic nerve injuries can result in chronic and debilitating health issues. Now, recent findings presented at the Annual Combined Meeting of the American Association for Hand Surgery examine some exciting repair techniques that may offer easier, more thorough repair along with fewer side-effects than currently existing techniques.

Researchers from the University of Kentucky note that many traumatic nerve injuries are not so clean-cut. For instance, the healing process can often only occur through extensive surgery. Furthermore, injuries sustained through farm equipment or gun-shots may require an even more extensive repair.

For the study, researchers compared two commonly used method: a nerve autograft and nerve conduits. The nerve autograft works by bridging the gap with a patient's own nerve taken from elsewhere in the body, which leads to nerve deficit at the donor site. Nerve conduits, on the other hand, or synthetic tubes, can sometimes cause foreign body reactions and increase the risk of infection.

Researchers compared the techniques with a newer technique called nerve allograft that uses human nerves harvested from cadavers.

Findings revealed that the newer technique provided more consistent results, overall.

"Nerve grafting has remained relatively unchanged for nearly 100 years, and both of the existing nerve repair options had serious drawbacks," said UK Medical Director of Hand Surgery Service Dr. Brian Rinker, in a news release. "Our study showed that the new technique processed nerve allograft - provides a better, more predictable and safer nerve gap repair compared to the previous techniques."

Researchers concluded that future work in science is underway to engineer nerve allografts with growth factors that guide nerve regeneration with overall faster and more thorough results.