I believe that all products go through a decline cycle. I’m thinking how technology seems to evolve in terms of phones. Phones themselves are always in high demand and the use of phones has actually increased over the years. However phones are constantly updated and new generations are introduced to the market. This is how they stay relevant. Demand for older phone generations start to decline. In terms of your suture example, sutures overall have not declined in demand but individual models or suture types might have become outdated and gone through the decline cycle. As technology evolves and better materials are found, products will be replaced by better and newer and older products will fade into the background or become discontinued.

This is my interpretation of the original post on this thread.