A team of scientists at the Ohio State University has found that steady electrical stimulation generates increased permeability across blood vessels, an important characteristic that can help wound-healing substances in the blood reach injuries more efficiently.
Electric stimulation may be able to help blood vessels carry white blood cells and oxygen to wounds, speeding healing. Image credit: Arek Socha.
Blood vessels are crucial for wound healing — they thread throughout your body, carrying nutrients, cells and chemicals that can help control inflammation caused by an injury.
Oxygen and white blood cells — which protect the body from foreign invaders — are two key components delivered by blood vessels.
But when there is an injury, the architecture of the blood vessels at the wound site are disrupted. That also interrupts the vessels’ ability to help the wound heal.
Blood vessels regrow on their own, almost like the branches of trees, without external sources of electricity, as part of the healing process.
“And as the blood vessels begin to grow, they replenish the skin and cells and establish a healing barrier again,” said Dr. Shaurya Prakash, a researcher in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and the Comprehensive Cancer Center at the Ohio State University.
“But our question was: How do you make this process better and faster, and is there any benefit to doing that?”
In lab tests performed using human cells, the researchers found that stimulating blood vessels with electricity showed a marked increase in blood vessel permeability, which is a physical marker suggestive of possible new vessel growth.
The study suggested that changes in blood vessel permeability could get those bloodborne cells to a wound site more quickly, though it did not explain the reasons why that happened.
It seemed to indicate that electricity affected the proteins that hold blood vessel cells together, but those results were not conclusive.
“These initial findings are exciting, and the next phase of the work will require us to study if and how we can actually grow new vessels,” Dr. Prakash said.
“The results imply that one of the primary ways blood vessels work to heal injuries is by allowing molecules and cells to move across the vessels’ walls,” said Dr. Jon Song, also from the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and the Comprehensive Cancer Center at the Ohio State University.
“And now we have better understanding for how electric stimulation can change the permeability across the vessel walls.”
“Let’s say you have a cutaneous wound, like a paper cut, and your blood vessels are severed and that’s why you have blood leaking out.”
“What you need is a bunch of bloodborne cells to come to that place and exit out the blood vessel to initiate the wound repair.”
The findings were published in the journal Lab on a Chip.
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Prashanth Mohana Sundaram et al. 2021. Direct current electric field regulates endothelial permeability under physiologically relevant fluid forces in a microfluidic vessel bifurcation model. Lab Chip 21: 319-330; doi: 10.1039/D0LC00507J
This article is based on text provided by the Ohio State University.
Source link: https://www.sci.news/medicine/electric-stimulation-wound-healing-09442.html
