Does anyone know anything about disk rehydration? Personal experiences? What your condition was? Did it work for you? For how long? Etc.

I've had two surgeries on my L4/L5 disk and don't want a 3rd. I fear I'll need a fusion next since the pain has returned again.

Thanks,

Hi Geno, welcome.

I'm not familiar with rehydration; I have arthritis too severe to be operable, but from reading your other post, you may be a candidate for disc replacement (with an artificial disc). Of course I'm not a doctor and can't say for sure, but it's something you might look into & ask a surgeon about.

Doc

Hi Geno,



http://US20070150060A1.pdf

This is my first attempt at posting a link so it may not work. It is a 15 page PDF article about rehydration of discs. Way about my head.

You did not state your age or if you experienced a trauma nor how your disc desiccation affects you. All factors to be considered.

Degenerative disc disease and/or disc desiccation are natural in the aging process.

I do not know anything about rehydration so I can only offer the article.

Wishing you the best. The name of the article (in case my link does not work which I am pretty sure I messed up) is ....Rehydration and Restoration of Intervertebral Discs with Polyelectrolytes. Click on the PDF version to see the graphs and article.

Dear Geno,

Until I read your thread, I had never heard of rehydration. You activated my curiosity so I went on a search regarding it. What I found was very different methods of rehydration. One I already sent to you with a link in my prior post but further search also indicated PT and traction as a "natural" method for rehydrating discs.

What procedure exactly are you considering?

Sorry to hear your prior surgeries have not provided permanent relief.

Hi Geno,

Oops. As suspected, my link does not work. Sorry.

Maybe you can get to the article from the title I posted.

Hopeless, I'm finding a patent application (PDF, 15 pgs), but not an article per se. Didn't see any graphs in it.

If you can get to the article again, open a second window to Neurotalk, log on here, reply to this thread, and try copying (CTRL-C) the link from the article window (The URL in the window at the very top of your browser) and pasting (CTRL-V) it into the reply in the 2nd window. That should work.

Doc

Hi Doc,

I thought I had done that BUT with an exception. I used he little icon in the reply box for "insert link" and then pasted. After clicking on submission of my reply, the link showed up in blue as I had hoped. I clicked on my blue link in my post and got an error message that the page did not exist. I will try it again. Thanks for your help.

Hi Hopeless,

I did find several articles with the above mentioned titles that you provided; they were statements regarding patents on devices/methods of rehydrating the discs. I admit that I did not read them in their entirety, only very briefly skimmed them. That said, while there may or may not be something useful there, I did not immediately see that there were any FDA approvals for stated devices nor did I find anything on Medline to support efficacious trials.

Generally, if one follows Kirkaldy-Willis model of disc degeneration, the pathophysiology would describe annular tears leading to interlaminer tears progressing to radial tears of the disc that ultimately lead to seepage or extrusion of disc material from the disc (herniation, etc.). Healthy discs are "fed" while we sleep when there is less axial pressure exerted so fluid and nutrients are embibed from the adjacent vertebral endplates into the discs. That is why we are taller in the morning; there is more fluid captured within the disc. That fluid is "squeezed" out of the discs back into the vertebra as the day progress due to axial loading. Degenerative discs lose their ability to hold fluid (and nutrients) leading to disc collapse. So...I am not sure how any system can repair a degenerative disc's ability to hold fluid and nutrients once that is lost. Further, if one looks at pain generators of the spine, while there are a few pain fibers found within the posterior annular fibers of the discs that may produce pain, there are more obvious structures that have been documented to produce pain such as damaged or irritated facet joints, direct compression of nerve roots or the cord (central and lateral foraminal stensosis, disc hernia, various spurs), instability, etc. and the list goes on. So even if it is possible to rehydrate the discs to the point of "pumping it up," I am not certain that the other structures that can produce pain and have become degenerative can be rendered quiescent. The whole process is just more complicated than that, I think!

Hmmm... I think that's generally for embedding a link into text, creating a hotlink <--like this (that's what I always use it for anyway) but I just tried it, and it seems to work fine the way you describe, so something else might have gone wrong...

Doc

http://www.google.com.au/patents/US6187048