What Factors Lead to Racial Disparities in Outcomes After Total Knee Arthroplasty?

Total knee arthroplasty (TKA) is one of the most commonly performed, major elective surgeries in the USA. African American TKA patients on average experience worse clinical outcomes than whites, including lower improvements in patient-reported outcomes and higher rates of complications, hospital readmissions, and reoperations. The mechanisms leading to these racial health disparities are unclear, but likely involve patient, provider, healthcare system, and societal factors.

Cardiovascular tissue bioprinting: Physical and chemical processes.

Three-dimensional (3D) cardiac tissue bioprinting occupies a critical crossroads position between the fields of materials engineering, cardiovascular biology, 3D printing, and rational organ replacement design. This complex area of research therefore requires expertise from all those disciplines and it poses some unique considerations that must be accounted for. One of the chief hurdles is that there is a relatively limited systematic organization of the physical and chemical characteristics of bioinks that would make them applicable to cardiac bioprinting.