Update 17 – Cartilage Degeneration Disorders – September 1st, 2014

First Issue

In the last month or so I have found out that certain close friends and family members, who are still extremely young, have already started to suffer from severe articular cartilage degeneration. It seems that the phenomena of cartilage degeneration is a much, MUCH more prevalent medical condition than I would have thought.

That is why I am going to put much more focus, effort, and energy on also figuring out how to possibly repair articular cartilage damage than before. I am not saying that I am going to figure out the next best thing to treat osteo-arthritis or tissue inflammation but I understand that what I have been researching non-stop for the last 2 year can be very helpful in my own personal life, and to the people around me who I care about.

This desire to help people become taller and gain height even after skeletal maturity will always be there, with a focus on the scientific research. I also now understand that what I have uncovered can also be used to treat much more severe medical conditions.

If I have the chance to help someone out with a medical condition with the deep insight that I gained from thousands of hours of reading, then I would do that.

Second Issue

Most of the people who have regularly visited the website might have noticed that over time, it has slowly changed in form, and become more technical. Some of it might get harder to understand and read. That is something that I knew would happen. The level of medical understanding needs to improve over time (as well as the quality of writing).

With a much more sophisticated understanding of the overall human body, I would finally be able to understand the research that the world’s top experts are working on. If I can, I want to synthesize the results that they have found to discover something completely new.

A recent search on Google lead me to this question posed in the USMLE Step 1 Exam and it showed me that there is still much more I need to learn and understand before I can ever make a clear and logical argument on our theories before any professional orthopedic specialist.

It seems that my understanding of at least the process of Mesenchymal Stem Cell Condensation during embryogenesis to form the Chondrocytes is still lacking on how the protein signal pathways work.

I asked the question later whether the chemical compound Dibutyryl cAMP can be used as a way to get the MSCs in our own blood marrow to go directly into the chondrogenic lineage like they seem to do during the embryogenic process. It would turn out that I was wrong about this issue. Dibutyryl cAMP is a very unique compound which is only expressed/found in chondrocytes. It seems to be a type of chemical indicator used by researchers to check to make sure that what a cell differentiated into is indeed actually chondrocytes.