To heal a wound, turn up the voltage

[Celebration]

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19125624.400

It may sound like something out of Frankenstein, but electric currents applied to the skin could potentially speed up wound healing. Ironically, though the phenomenon was reported 150 years ago by the German physiologist Emil Du Bois-Reymond, it has been ignored ever since.

Now Josef Penninger of the Austrian Institute of Molecular Biotechnology in Vienna and Min Zhao of the University of Aberdeen, UK, have demonstrated that natural electric fields and currents in tissue play a vital role in orchestrating the wound-healing process by attracting repair cells to damaged areas.

...................snip................

Cells and tissues essentially function as chemical batteries, with positively charged potassium ions and negatively charged chloride ions flowing across membranes. This creates electric field patterns all over the body. When tissue is wounded this disrupts the battery, effectively short-circuiting it. Penninger and his colleagues realised that it is the resulting altered fields that attract and guide repair cells to the damaged area.

The researchers grew layers of mouse cells and larger tissues, such as corneas, in the lab. After "wounding" these tissues, they applied varying electric fields to them, and found they could accelerate or completely halt the healing process depending on the orientation and strength of the field (Nature, vol 442, p 457).

[BrklynLiberal]

1. Wasn't there some info about this same concept to help heal broken bones?

I remember reading or hearing about that a while back.

TECHNOLOGY used in electric toothbrushes will dramatically cut the recovery time for patients with broken bones, returning them to a fully active life in half the time it takes at the moment.

Engineers at Edinburgh University have developed an implant, smaller than a battery watch, that can be placed against a fractured bone to deliver a minute electrical current which encourages bone growth.
<snip>

http://www.megavolt.co.il/articles/Hi_Tech_healing.html



A reference to the article you posted
http://techdirt.com/articles/20060726/1813237.shtml

[Trillo]

2. What polarity?

after reading this excerpt of the Original Poster's link shortly after it was posted:

...and found they could accelerate or completely halt the healing process depending on the orientation and strength of the field (Nature, vol 442, p 457).

One of my questions was what polarity? Another was what fields accelerate versus halt the healing process.

Some of these questions are partly answered by this article that appears written by a professor of physical therapy:

How to use electrical stimulation for wound healing

Nursing, Dec 2002 by Kloth, Luther C

WOUND & SKIN CARE

...

Polarity of the electrode or electrodes placed on or straddling the wound depends on the wound's clinical needs. To promote autolysis, use positive polarity to attract negatively charged neutrophils and macrophages. To encourage granulation tissue development, use negative polarity to attract positively charged fibroblasts. To stimulate wound resurfacing, use positive polarity to attract negatively charged epidermal cells.

...

Read more
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3689/is_200212/ai_n9159325

It appears there are hundreds of studies about electrotherapy in relation to wound healing at PubMed, unfortunately, most of them do not have the complete text freely available.