Advances of residual limb muscle atrophy in biomechanics research

Muscle atrophy of the stumps after lower limb amputation has always been a crucial factor resulted in inefficient clinical rehabilitation and athletic recovery for the amputated patients. Therefore, understanding the initiating and developing mechanism of muscle atrophy is very important for the improvement of amputation, restoration training and prosthetic design, which is also widely concerned in the prosthetic rehabilitation field. This paper will review the advances of residual limb muscle atrophy researches on the approaches and models, the mechanical properties of the residual limb, the micro pathologic characteristics as well as the prevention strategies of muscle atrophy in recent years. It can be concluded that further researches are needed to study the special physiologic and mechanical environment in residual limb, which affected the growth of muscle cells as well as the dynamic balance of the muscle protein synthesis and decomposition before completely understanding the mechanism of residual limb muscle atrophy and definitely clarifying its real cause.