BACKGROUND: Hand metacarpophalangeal and interphalangeal joint defects caused by trauma, infection, tumor excision or congenital disease seriously affect hand function and contour. At present, there are many methods for the repair of hand bone or joint damage, but none of them can effectively reconstruct the joint anatomic structure and function to restore the normal activity function of joints. OBJECTIVE: To summarize the domestic and foreign researches on the reconstruction of injured hand bone or joint, and to explore the research status and progress of each method in recent years. RETRIEVAL STRATEGY: A computer-based online search of PubMed was undertaken to identify the English articles dated from January 1980 to August 2007 with the keywords "hand, bone and joint injury". In addition, we searched China Periodical Full-text Database, Wanfang Database, and VIP database for the related articles published in Chinese between January 1997 and August 2007-08 with the keywords "hand, bone and joint damage, treatment" in Chinese. We also manually searched the related books. Finally, 62 articles were collected. After the first trial, only articles closely correlated with treatment of hand joint damage, and published in the near future or in the authoritative journals were selected. Duplicated researches were excluded. LITERATURE EVALUATION: The articles mainly discussed the research progress in joint damage treatment. Of the 30 selected articles, 5 were review articles, and the others were clinical or basic experimental studies. DATA SYNTHESIS: Now, there are many methods for treating hand joint damage such as fusion of joint, arthroplasty, prosthetic replacement, joint transplantation, cartilage transplantation, cell transplantation, and tissue engineering technique. How to integrate the advantages of each therapy to explore more fast, effective, and low damage treatment methods has become the hot spot in present studies. CONCLUSION: Although the joint reconstruction in hand with bone or joint defects has made a great progress, it still needs further improvement in clinic. To explore fast, highly effective, and low damage treatment method is a hot spot in recent researches.

ive] To explore a new method of evaluating the healing of fractures. [Methods] Self-con trolled trial was applied. Bone mineral density ( BMD) of fracture end (region 3, R 3 ) and its neighboring proximal and distal regions ( R 2 and R 1 respectively) in 126 cases of fracture of lower end of radius was deter mined by dual-energy X-ray absorptionmetry. [Results] BMD of R3 elevated as compared with that of R 2 and R1 (P