Role of Polylactic Acid in Bone Regeneration –A Systematic Review

Bone regeneration is a complex, physiological process of bone formation, which can be seen during normal fracture healing, and is involved in continuous remodeling throughout adult life. However, there are complex clinical conditions in which bone regeneration is required in large quantity, such as for skeletal reconstruction of large bone defects created by trauma, infection, tumor resection and skeletal abnormalities. The use of bone grafts is the standard to treat skeletal fractures, or to replace and regenerate lost bone. The most commonly used is auto graft, its use can lead to complications such as pain, infection, scarring, blood loss, and donor-site morbidity. An ideal bone graft or scaffold should be made of biomaterials that imitate the structure and properties of natural bone. However, creating living tissue constructs that are structurally, functionally and mechanically comparable to the natural bone has been a challenge so far. An electronic search was conducted for articles in PubMed database to screen for articles from 1966 to sept 2014 discussing the role of polylactic acid in bone regeneration using selected keywords. Critical appraisal was done for selected articles, Search yields a total of 383 articles of which 318 full text article were obtained, 30 articles were selected after reading the abstract out of which 10 met the inclusion criteria and 308 were excluded and hand search was done with the reference of the selected articles. The article selected used polylactic acid for bone regeneration. The present Systematic review indicates, when polylactic acid is modified with osteoinductive material such as beta tricalcium phosphate and hydroxyl appetite crystals shows better acceptance than plain polylactic acid.