Which are the phases of tissue healing?

Prepare for the Tissue Injury, Healing, and Pain Test. Utilize flashcards and multiple-choice questions with hints and explanations. Ensure you're ready for the exam!

Healing after tissue injury unfolds in three overlapping stages: inflammation, proliferation, and remodeling. The inflammation stage is the immediate response that controls bleeding, clears debris, and weapons against infection. Immune cells arrive, fluids and signaling molecules create an environment that supports repair.

Then the proliferation stage builds new tissue. Fibroblasts lay down collagen and extracellular matrix, new blood vessels grow to supply the developing tissue (angiogenesis), granulation tissue forms, and epithelial cells migrate to cover the wound. This phase restores the barrier and provides scaffolding for strength.

Finally, remodeling matures the repair. Collagen is realigned and cross-linked, with type III collagen gradually replaced by stronger type I collagen. The tissue gains tensile strength over time, but never fully returns to pre-injury strength for many injuries.

Options that omit a phase or swap in a different early process don’t capture the full progression. For example, naming only inflammation misses the tissue-building and strengthening steps, while listing only proliferation and remodeling excludes the necessary initial inflammatory response, and treating hemostasis as a separate phase leaves out the subsequent repair processes.