Research Paper Volume 12, Issue 4 pp 3617—3625
Inflammatory macrophages facilitate mechanical stress-induced osteogenesis
- 1 Department of Orthopedic Surgery, Changzheng Hospital, Second Military Medical University, Shanghai 200001, China
- 2 Department of Orthopedic Surgery, No. 906 Hospital of the People’s Liberation Army, Ningbo 330212, China
- 3 Department of Spine Surgery, LinZhou Hospital of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Linzhou 456550, China
Received: December 11, 2019 Accepted: January 27, 2020 Published: February 25, 2020
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.102833How to Cite
Copyright © 2020 Zhang et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
Mechanical stress has been recognized as a key inducer of bone regeneration in bone damage, which is experimentally mimicked by distraction osteogenesis (DO), a bone-regenerative process induced by post-osteotomy distraction of the surrounding vascularized bone segments, and realized by new bone formation within the distraction gap. The mechanisms that underlie the DO-induced bone regeneration remain poorly understood and a role of macrophages in the process has been inadequately studied. Here, in a mouse model of DO, we showed significant increase in macrophages in the regeneration area. Moreover, in a loss-of-function approach by depleting inflammatory macrophages, the bone regeneration was compromised by assessment of histology and molecular biology. Thus, our study demonstrates the necessary participation of inflammatory macrophages in the process of DO-induced bone regeneration, and suggests that targeting inflammatory macrophages may help to improve clinical bone repair.