Primary And Secondary Bone Healing

Once you would have a single broken bone in your body, you are already said to have experienced this medical condition called a bone fracture. When this happens, the normal bone architecture has been disturbed. Thus, you should do something in order to solve this medical condition in the soonest time possible in order for you to restore your activities to the routine one.

Causes of Bone Fracture

A broken bone usually happens when the bones would experience high impact or bone injury. There are also certain diseases that can trigger broken bones occurrence. When you have overused and overstressed the bones in your body, the result would be small cracks that will weaken these injured bones. There are also some causes which are pointed to as triggers of bone fracture.

• Falls
• High impact and all-out sports injuries
• Osteoporosis
• Quick and unnatural movements
• Overuse
• Bone injuries in Accidents
• Tumors

Two Kinds of Bone Healing

The moment that you will break a bone, new cells will then be working immediately to get you some new bones that will spring from the same area as the fractured one. Bone healing is one of the most interesting processes that the human body has to go through. If healing is done in the best manner possible, scars may not even be visible afterward. There are also two different kinds of bone healing – primary and secondary bone healing. Each has different approaches to healing broken bones. The main difference between these two is the formation of callus.

Rehabilitation or rehab is required.

Primary Bone Healing

The most distinguishable feature of this bone healing is that it does not involve any callus at all with the recovery of the fractured bones. Instead, it has the cortex working in order to rebuild itself after the break or the crack. In order to continue working and functioning, the cortex on the left should be reconnected to the cortex on the right. However, this process requires that little fracture fragments should also be restored via rigid internal fixation. It also needs a significant reduction on the inter-fragmentary strain. Blood vessels will once again be created once the bone cells will already make a tunnel-like structure and with the proper flow of blood will once again resume.

Secondary Bone Healing

As this is opposite to primary bone healing, this kind of healing involves callus formation in almost every stage that the process has. These stages would include impaction, inflammation, the formation of the primary soft callus, mineralization and remodeling of the callus formation. Each stage will be described in the following manner.

• Impaction stage. This requires an impact to be made in order for the bone fracture to be seen just on the area with the least resistance. As this is the impaction stage, you can expect that after the impact, certain damages will ensue on certain parts such as the periosteum, the bone marrow (local), living bone, and the adjacent soft tissue. Blood supply is also cut off when the blood vessels are cut off as well. Local cells are sensitized and as per other studies, this lasts for around seven days.

• The inflammation stage. In this stage, hemorrhage and hematoma are formed as a result of the lack of blood flow in the endosteal and periosteal blood vessels. Thrombosis is also involved in this stage especially with the involvement of blood vessels. The lysosomal enzymes would be activated while the right acidic pH will also be given to you. Along with the invasion of inflammatory cells, the patient has to face swelling, pain, and heat.

• Primary soft callus formation stage. The sensitization and stimulation of the cells found in previous stages will now provide new blood vessels, supporting cells, fibroblasts, and intracellular material. For fracture fragments to be connected to each other once more, the tissue has to appear around the fractured area. Granulation tissues should then be removed. This happens for two weeks.

• Callus mineralization stage. This happens one week after new callus can be seen springing in the injured part. Increased oxygen tension will produce osteoid which makes the callus rigid. This will take four to sixteen weeks in order to hasten the healing process

• Remodellation stage. Instead of callus, new bones will be replaced with new bones. The new bone will be created by osteoclasts acts. The cartilage that underwent mineralization forms the first spongiosa bone. Woven bones will be replaced with lamellar bones with secondary osteons. This stage takes about one to four years in all.

Bone Healing Time or Bone Recovery Time is more than 1 month.