Mechanism found to boost muscle injury repair

Editor's Note

Delayed muscle healing and preoperative muscle atrophy, such as in patients with osteoporosis can negatively affect total joint replacement surgery. It can increase the risk of complications, prolong recovery, and impair long-term function.

But a new study published online in Current Biology shares how researchers at Cincinnati Children’s found a mechanism that may help improve healing across several types of muscle injury, according to a November 21 news story from Cincinnati Children’s on the research findings.

The unexpected mechanism for muscle recovery was discovered in mice. It occurs at the cellular level by an immune cell type called macrophages. These white blood cells are better known for engulfing harmful bacteria and dead cells. But these cells also have a synaptic-like property that delivers an ion to a muscle fiber to facilitate its repair after an injury, one of the investigators described.

He noted, “it’s literally like the way a neuron works, and it’s working in an extremely fast synaptic-like fashion to regulate repair.”

Meanwhile, the connected macrophages trigger a similar process of cell regeneration that helped mice with disease-like muscle damage. After detecting damage, the immune cells flocked to the area and induced waves of muscle fiber activity. After 10 days, treated mice showed larger numbers of new muscle fibers compared to a control group, per the news story.

The investigators concluded that if human macrophages behave the same way after muscle injury, further research could potentially find therapeutic ways to control the muscle healing process.