Necrotic tissue is dead tissue and is no longer viable. It can cause infection or it just serves no purpose even with blood flow within the area. It’s impossible for it to be reversed. Why can’t it be though? What progress have scientists made with that?

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Necrotic tissue is dead tissue and is no longer viable. It can cause infection or it just serves no purpose even with blood flow within the area. It’s impossible for it to be reversed. Why can’t it be though? What progress have scientists made with that?

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6 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Why can’t we undo death? Entropy.

You know how if you carry a wire around in your backpack, like headphones or a long charging cable, it always ends up tangled? That’s because it’s always being moved and jostled along. There are maybe a hundred different ways that your headphones could be looped up nicely, but millions upon millions of formations in which they are tangled. So if the wire is jostled and allowed to move into any formation at all, probability dictates that it will be tangled.

Same thing with a living cell. If you take all the atoms of a cell, there are… uh… what comes after quadrillion… I don’t know, some absurdly large number of arrangements they can take. Of those arrangements, maybe a few million are arrangements that constitute a living cell. It takes energy for a cell to maintain its form. Once you cut the cell off from energy by removing the blood supply, it undergoes necrosis. It falls apart, gets “tangled up” in an arrangement that is no longer a cell. Because there are billions more ways to NOT be a cell than there are ways to be a cell. The only way to get a bit of matter to take the form of a cell is for it to come from another cell when it divides.

Therefore, the solution to necrotic tissue is to cut it out and allow the nearby cells to replicate themselves to replace their dead comrades. Because the only way to get cells from randomly assorted matter is for cells to get other cells to absorb energy and then replicate. And ultimately, that’s what necrosis is. Randomly assorted matter that used to be a cells.

It’s kind of like, if a bomb blows up a building, you don’t put the building pieces back together. No, you have to build a new building all over again. Sure, you can take bits from the old building and recycle them, but inevitably some portions will go to waste because they cannot be recycled, and some new un-recycled material will have to be added in.

Anonymous 0 Comments

You know that it’s dead, you said so yourself. So what are you asking? Why can’t scientists bring back something from the dead?

Anonymous 0 Comments

There will be never a progress for reviving necrotic tissue. ‘Dead’ cells degrade and this process is accelerated by enzyms that develop during the degrading process.

Think of the cell as a very small test tube with a complex mixture of many, many different reagents. When the environment in this cell becomes perturbed by external circumstances like heat, cold, less water or to much, or a change of oxygen concentration in blood, just to name a few, those reagents react in a different and almost every time unfavorable (poisonous) way. So the ‘normal’ products won’t be produced and wrong products will be released into the blood circulation and infect other cells to the same effect.

So there’s no way to repair that cell. And if to many cells are dysfunctional the body dies. That’s the reason why burns are so dangerous and big burns are life threatening.

Anonymous 0 Comments

I give you an excavator and 5 million popped balloons. Is it at all feasible for you to use the excavator to patch up and reinflate all the balloons?

Also the balloons are filled with thumbtacks that are going to pop other nearby balloons unless you get the balloons patched up and seal the thumbtacks in them pronto.

Anonymous 0 Comments

It is impossible for necrotic tissue to be reversed, it’s biologically inert… It is absolutely an infection problem since it provides a space where bacteria can reproduce, which the immune system is unable to attack. It also, in case of wounds, slows the natural healing process, since it’s like a pile of debris that needs to be cleared before be tissue can be “laid down”…

The main progress that’s being made is around better/safer/less painful/less destructive methods of debridement (clearing the necrotic tissue) so the bodies natural healing can take over. Using larval dressings is pretty cool, although kinda gross…

Anonymous 0 Comments

It’s dead. We can’t make dead things undead. The tech doesn’t exist. When living tissue dies, a whole host of biological and chemical processes cease and the tissue very quickly starts to decompose and break down on the cellular level. Connections to other tissue is severed and the dead tissue has no defense against bacterial and cellular agents that eat and destroy the once living tissue. Repairs (which happen constantly in living tissue) don’t happen and defects build up. Once a certain point is reached, the tissue is simply dead and unrecognizable to the body.

You can keep living tissue alive by slowing biological processes (like, e.g., putting an organ for transfer on ice), but even then you have a limited amount of time before decomposition sets in. Or you can keep it alive by keeping it connected to a blood supply to provide nutrients and carry off waste, but that’s only a necessary but not always a sufficient condition.