Pulsed Electromagnetic Field (PEMF) therapy is a non-invasive and non-thermal treatment widely used nowadays to treat various types of disorders and traumas, both in humans and animals. Initially applied only for wound healing, today it finds many applications in medicine for the treatment of bone fractures, arthritis, inflammation, edema, and pain.

Pulsed electromagnetic field therapy may play an important role in medicine as a complementary treatment for various human diseases and, by deepening the studies in the future, it will be possible not only to understand the exact mechanisms of action but also to extend its application to other pathologies both in the medical and veterinary fields.

Hartley guinea pigs spontaneously develop arthritis that bears morphological, biochemical, and immunohistochemical similarities to human osteoarthritis. It is characterized by the appearance of superficial fibrillation by 12 months of age and severe cartilage lesions and eburnation by 18 months of age. This study examines the effect of treatment with a pulsed electromagnetic field (PEMF) upon the morphological progression of osteoarthritis in this animal model.

Apart from preliminary notices of present work, previous reports of experimental and clinical trials of the effects of a high-peak pulsedelectromagnetic field (PEMF) on degeneration and regeneration of peripheral nerves lacked statistical analysis. Therefore, we designed experiments with standardised operative, histological, cytological and morphometric techniques to assess the effect of PEMF on lesions of the common peroneal nerves in paired male rats matched for age, environmental conditions and level and type of lesion.

The present study investigated the effects of pulsed electromagnetic field (PEMF) on the tensile biomechanical properties of diabetic wounds at different phases of healing. Two intensities of PEMF were adopted for comparison.

The present findings demonstrated that the PEMF delivered at 10 mT can improve energy absorption capacity of diabetic wounds in the early healing phase. However, PEMF (both 2-mT and 10-mT) seemed to impair the material properties (maximum stress and Young’s modulus) in the remodeling phase. PEMF may be a useful treatment for promoting the recovery of structural properties (maximum load and energy absorption capacity), but it might not be applied at the remodeling phase to avoid impairing the recovery of material properties.

A large body of evidence indicates that pulsed electromagnetic fields (PEMF), as a safe and noninvasive method, could promote in vivo and in vitro osteogenesis.

Herein, the efficiency of PEMF on osteoporotic bone microarchitecture, bone strength, and bone metabolism, together with its associated signaling pathway mechanism, was systematically investigated in hindlimb-unloaded (HU) rats.

After 4 weeks, micro-computed tomography (µCT) results showed that PEMF ameliorated the deterioration of trabecular and cortical bone microarchitecture. Three-point bending test showed that PEMF mitigated HU-induced reduction in femoral mechanical properties, including maximum load, stiffness, and elastic modulus.

A commercial research and development feasibility study was conducted using a critical bone gap of 1.0 cm, surgically created in the radial bone of the left forelimb, to determine the viability of PEMF for generating bone to refill the gap in an otherwise non-healing tissue injury site.

The key parameter for biological effectiveness of PEMF was determined to be magnetic slew rate (dB/dt), and the minimum threshold of this parameter for clinical effectiveness for regeneration of bone tissue after orthopedic injury was found to be ~ 100 kG/s. This magnetic slew rate, when sustained for 100 μs at a pulse rate of 10 Hz, was found to be effective both for pain reduction as well as to induce bone regeneration in a critical defect gap.