Influence of electromagnetic fields on endochondral bone formation
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Updated: Oct 21, 2026

Culturing and Measuring Fetal and Newborn Murine Long Bones
Published on: April 26, 2019
1Department of Orthopaedics, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island 00928.
Abstract:
Endochondral ossification is a basic physiological process in limb development and is central to bone repair and linear growth. Factors which regulate endochondral ossification include several biophysical and biochemical agents and are of interest from clinical and biological perspectives. One of these agents, electric stimulation, has been shown to result in enhanced synthesis of extracellular matrix, calcification, and bone formation in a number of experimental systems and is the subject of this review. The effects of electric stimulation have been studied in embryonic limb rudiments, growth plates, and experimental endochondral ossification induced with decalcified bone matrix and, in all these models, endochondral ossification has been enhanced. It is not known definitively whether electric fields stimulate cell differentiation or modulate an increased number of molecules synthesized by committed cell population and this is a fertile area of current study.
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