How are severed limbs like fingers or hands reattached with the possibility of the person to regain full control?

Question

Shouldn’t the broken nerve endings or the muscle fibres not meld together? How do doctors reconnect those?

In: Biology

Answer 1

As you said, control depends on nerves. Blood vessels are VERY different from nerves. A vessel is simply a hollow tube which can easily be reconnected (called an anastomosis) to restore bloodflow and save the limb and if necessary a synthetic or even human tissue graft can be included if more length is needed. Nerves, on the other hand (no pun) are more like fiber optic cables. They contain a bunch of individual miniscule fibers that have to naturally reattach to regain function. In the case of a larger nerve it’s relatively easy to sew the two ends together but that doesn’t mean the individual fibers will find their mate and reattach correctly. Couple this with the fact that nerve regeneration is a VERY slow process and the final outcome is a crapshoot. Microsurgery has made it much easier to approximate them so it’s much more possible than in the past to regain function.