In a paper published today in PLoS Computational Biology, researchers at the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC) –based in Barcelona Scientific Park– describe some important findings gleaned from looking at the effect of outside influences on healthy and unhealthy discs. They showed that weight or pressure on already degenerated discs has less effect on the transport of nutrients and cell products than on healthy ones – and that changes in cell density in discs are fundamental to the process of disc degeneration.

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Using a computational model of the lumbar spine that takes into account nutritional and mechanical effects, the scientists looked at the effect of external “loading” on two important cell solutes related to disc metabolism: oxygen and lactate. Degenerative changes are supposed to be linked to a failure in the transport of nutrients from the peripheral blood vessels to the discs, which affects such solute concentration within the disc and depends on tissue composition and the disc’s response to mechanical loads. They found that the effect of loading was greater when compressing a healthy disc than a degenerated one, and promoted fluctuations of the concentration of the solutes

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