Scientists from Trinity College Dublin are assessing how the development of spinal ligaments provide mechanical stability and impact postural support in the spine – with a view to better understanding how developmental "missteps" may contribute to spinal deformations, such as the characteristic curved spines that develop in people with scoliosis.
Scoliosis can affect people of any age but typically affects children in their early teens and cause back pain, as well as structural and postural abnormalities, which, when extreme, can result in a push on the lungs and associated difficulties in breathing. Better understanding how – and why – the condition develops may provide the chance to direct meaningful, preventative interventions, which is one of the driving forces behind the work.
In the new research, recently published in the Journal of Anatomy, the group of scientists became the first to use – and confirm the suitability of – an animal model (chick embryos) to closely examine the maturation of spinal ligaments. Specifically, they anatomically profiled six ligaments across late stages of development and revealed changes in collagen fibre organisation that provide strength for the tissue – spotlighting areas worth close follow-up investigation.
"The next steps are to profile the strength changes in these tissues during maturation, and to investigate the importance of embryonic movement for their maturation," explained Rebecca Rolfe, Assistant Professor in Trinity's School of Natural Sciences, the senior author of the research article.
"We know that embryonic movement is critical for the development of other aspects of the musculoskeletal system, including tendons, that connect muscle to bone, but we do not know of its importance for ligaments."
"And because we know spinal ligaments are sometimes altered in scoliotic patients we are keen to investigate this potential connection in greater detail – there is next to no knowledge about their contribution to defects and conditions in the spine, and spinal deformations, especially those seen in Adolescent idiopathic scoliosis, have a range of associated contributing factors."
This new study, performed by Zoology graduate Sarah Hennigan, provides the first evidence that the embryonic chick is an appropriate model to study spinal ligament development and has added knowledge on the structural hallmarks of embryonic spinal ligament tissues. Future work will now investigate if defects in spinal ligaments during development result in failure during adolescent growth, ultimately contributing to adolescent scoliosis.
