Abstract
Articular cartilage can be damaged by trauma or by progressive degradation caused by disease. Unfortunately, it has a extremely limited capacity for repair and regeneration. The use of joint prosthesis has revolutionized but remains limited in its use. To know the possibility of clinical application of clinical application of autogenous bone-articular graft in open complicated intraarticular fractures we studied the change of bone-articular cartilage defect in medial femoral condyle of rabbits and viability of autogenous bone-articular graft stored within abdominal wall of rabbits. The results were obtained as follows: 1. There was over 90% viability of subchondral bone after 10 days storage in the adbominal wall but the articular cartilage showed degenerative change about 40% after 5 days passed. 2. The bone-articular defect was replaced by undifferentiated mesenchymal tissue and fibrous tissue, postoperative 6 weeks later. 3. In implanted bone-articular cartilage graft at 3 days, the chondrocyte of basal cell layer in articular cartilage was relatively well preserved but in 7 days, transplanted articular cartilage graft showed almost necrotic chage. Most of subchondral bones were well healed with host bone without regard to duration of implantation.