Skeletal muscle regeneration after damage by needle penetration and trauma

Skeletal muscles actually surround the dento-alveolar area. However, most dentists would be unaware that they damage skeletal muscle during routine procedures. Simple puncturing of buccinator muscle during an inferior alveolar block kills thousands of fibres. What happens to muscle fibres following such trauma? Pathology texts suggest that skeletal muscle does not regenerate and is replaced by fibrous scar tissue. However, for some decades it has been recognized that muscle fibres do in fact regenerate. In the early 1960s the "satellite" cell was discovered, lying between the muscle cell membrane and the external lamina. After 30 years of intensive research it has been clearly demonstrated that satellite cells are reserve mesenchyme cells which, once the adjacent muscle fibres are damaged, proliferate and provide a new population of young muscle cells, called "myoblasts". Myoblasts rapidly produce muscle specific proteins and fuse together in long chains, called "myotubes", which mature into typical muscle fibres.