Russian scientists have learned to treat bone injuries with freezing

The new technique has already been tested on rats.

Cooling a damaged bone by as little as five degrees can double its rate of recovery. A group of Russian scientists came to this conclusion. Based on their work, a technique is already being created for self-treatment of bone injuries with cold at home.

Cryotherapy has long been used by doctors: for hardening the body; as a means of cooling, for example, with bruises. It is also known that by cooling the skin we start an accelerated metabolism, which stimulates the processes of restoration of its cells. Now scientists want to create a technique that can be done independently at home to speed up the healing of fractures and other bone injuries.

Ideally, it would be necessary to directly cool the damaged bone, but this is inconvenient for practical application. Specialists from MSTU im. Bauman, National Medical Research Center for Traumatology and Orthopedics named after N.N. Priorov and Sechenov University checked whether the positive effect of cryotherapy is preserved if cold is applied to a bone defect through the skin.

For the experiment, 12 adult rats were selected and holes with a diameter of two millimeters were drilled in the bones of their both hind legs. The rodents were then divided into three groups. The first and second were treated with cryotherapy, cooling the skin at the site of injury with a special medical device, the third, the control group, was not exposed to cold at all.

Subjects in the first group were exposed to cold twice a week, those in the second group once a week. In both groups, only one paw was cooled to the rats; cryotherapy was not applied to the second paw.

The results were compared after six days. It turned out that the fastest healing occurred in those animals whose limbs were periodically subjected to cooling. In these rats, bone tissue recovered in six weeks. By the way, healing was faster in non-cooled directly injured paws, which were subjected to cryotherapy at a distance. According to the authors, this was due to the fact that exposure to cold affects not only the tissues at the site of the defect, but also the immune cells of the body as a whole.

Scientists hope that the use of targeted bone cooling (the work is being carried out by the Russian Science Foundation) will also help people in cases of treatment of complex fractures, for example, fractures with delayed union. However, whether good results can be achieved is unclear, as further clinical studies will show. So far, scientists continue only preclinical studies of the method on animals.