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Stents are used for the treatment of conditions such as paediatric laryngotracheal stenosis (LTS), a narrowing of the airway in children. While it can be something a child is born with or caused by injury, the condition can result in a life-threatening emergency if untreated.
Treatment is challenging, however. Depending on the severity, doctors use a combination of endoscopic techniques, surgical repair, tracheostomy, or deployment of stents to hold the airway open and enable breathing.
“While stents are great at holding the airway open and simultaneously allowing the trachea to continue growing, they can move around, or cause damage when they're eventually removed,” said a research announcement from the Pittsburgh team.
They hope to “drastically improve” the use of stents after demonstrating the successful use of a completely biodegradable magnesium-alloy tracheal stent for the first time.
“Using commercial non-biodegradable metal or silicone based tracheal stents has a risk of severe complications and doesn't achieve optimal clinical outcomes, even in adults,” said bioengineer Prashant N. Kumta, from the Swanson School of Engineering. “Using advanced biomaterials could offer a less invasive, and more successful, treatment option.”
In the study, the balloon-expandable ultra-high ductility (UHD) biodegradable magnesium stent was shown to perform better than current metallic non-biodegradable stents in both lab testing and rabbit models. The stent was shown to keep the airway open over time and have low degradation rates, displaying normal healing and no adverse problems. It degraded over eight weeks.
“Our results are very promising for the use of this novel biodegradable, high ductility metal stent, particularly for paediatric patients,” said Kumta. “We hope this new approach leads to new and improved treatments for patients with this complex condition, as well as other tracheal obstruction conditions including tracheal cancer.”
The research was published in Communications Biology.
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