Students Develop Bone-Lengthening Device (Biloine Young @ OTW)
Life is about to get a whole lot better for children undergoing distraction osteogenesis, thanks to a group of senior students at Rice University, Houston, Texas. Distraction osteogenesis is a method of correcting bone deformities that leave one limb shorter than the other. About 10 million children have this problem in either their arms or legs.
To correct it, surgeons break the bone and insert a distractor that stretches the bone and, over time, tugs it to the appropriate length. To keep constant tension on the bone, the patient has to, four times a day, give a screw in the bulky device a quarter turn.
Current patients wear distractors for as long as it takes to complete the process of lengthening the bone, typically two to four months. Then they leave the device on for six more weeks, while the bone sets. Mechanical engineering student Raquel Kahn, a member of the student team, said that each of the Rice students working on the project wore a standard distractor (minus the bone-drilling part) for 24 hours to get a feel for what patients endure.
At the urging of Gloria Gogola, M.D., a hand and upper extremity surgeon ...
