Stem cell knee therapy

I've only seen the supervet doing it on small animals. Extracted, grown up and just squirted into the joint. Certainly appeared to have done something visual to the areas where articular cartilage had gone missing, and the patient looked a lot happier.

I hope it can be made to work in humans because I'll be needing new knees some time in the next 20 years...

I've had 3 lots of meniscal cartilage surgery. Left knee is increasingly painful again so I hoped the orthopod could tidy it up a bit. The new MRI scan showed that the remaining medial meniscus is torn virtually the whole way round, which would explain why the pain seems to move about, but there's too little left to make further trimming a viable option if I want a stable knee joint. So I'm just being careful, avoiding the things that I know aggravate it (luckily cycling is fine) and hitting the ibuprofen and resting it when it flares up. He's still telling me I'll need knee replacements at some point...

keef66 wrote:

I've only seen the supervet doing it on small animals

And they say animal testing is bad.............

FWIW not necessarily my opinion - vanity products, yes, medical intervention, not so much.

Cartilage doesn't naturally grow inside the body, but once extracted it can be convinced to grow under certain conditions. As an operation, it's been going around for quite a few years but I couldn't comment on the availability, or success rate.

:0 Why not just use a decent knee support instead of risking surgery and emptying your bank account?

https://nuovahealth.co.uk/shop/open-patella-knee-support-brace/

Given my daughter has had donor stem cells recently with an aim to cure her leukaemia (seemingly reasonably successfully so far), getting some of your own to do this sounds like a great idea. Quite how they persuade them to become cartilage rather than head back to bone marrow, their natural home, I have no idea. Clever stuff.

There's some amazing stuff being discovered in almost every field of science and technology, stuff that could save the planet, improve lives and stop people dying. But for the most part, scientists are undervalued, under paid, and on short term contracts.

So in order to attract continued funding and raise awareness they put out press releases. Which are invariably misconstrued or dumbed down by the Daily mail as / Frankenfoods / Designer babies / They've grown a human ear on a mouse! That and things like the BSE crisis and Chernobyl, and vast swathes of the population are suspicious of scientists and evidence based decision making in general. Nobody wants to wade through the results of scientific research, they'd rather see what's trending on Twitter. Everybody is looking for a quick fix for something. Every week there's a new must-have superfood, and as soon as Waitrose sell out of Goji berries it'll be something else. And don't get me started on extreme / celebrity diets and clean eating...

Politicians claim to take advice from scientists, but only when it suits them and if somebody else is paying, and they won't be treading on the toes of big business or adversely affecting tax revenues. Take the current fiasco about air quality.

Meanwhile the fat and greedy bankers fcuk things up by risky lending and convoluted investment products, and plunge the rest of us into a decade long financial crisis and years of austerity and pay freezes.

And all of which might mean sweet FA since we're at the mercy of a tangerine buffoon with a Twitter habit, who's picking a fight with a delusional dictator with nuclear ambitions.

I know a guy who has had several major knee ops. First one they drilled the bone to encourage cartilage growth, second one was the cartilage grown in the lab and imported back into the knee, third one was a knee replacement which tells you how successful the first two procedures were. He's since ridden his first 200k so as far as cycling goes the knee replacement seems to be working.

After 3 arthroscopies; years of research; trials of alternatives (like apostherapy) I came to the conclusion in 2014 that the only viable option was to have a replacement knee at the age of 50. This is what led me back to cycling after a 30 year absence. The easy answer around all such treatments are that there are no cures - everything out there really only slows down the deterioration in the knee joint.

Advances in knee technology mean that there appears to be a knee out there that is, effectively, a "Duracell" knee. Its made of Oxinium (Oxidised Zirconium) by Smith and Nephew. I have one - and its believed it will last 25 years. It actually has plasticised pads inside that can be changed if wear occurs (the big problem with knees is that for a second replacement to take place they have to smash the first one out). Knee's are like tyres and surgeons are like stockists in that they only tend to use 1 type of tyre. When done privately, all types of knee cost the same (2014 - c.£11k) and so it pays to (a) research which type of knee you want and (b) what surgeon you want to do it. No sense in having a poor workman use good tools.

If someone had said there was a lasting cure for £100k, or spending £25k would buy me 5 years with my old knee then I would have done it without hesitation. For me, replacing the joint was the best thing I could have done. This year I have upped my mileage on the bike and will do just under 5,000 miles; last year was 3,000.

There are downsides - but when you start looking for therapies or miracle cures then they are still upsides by comparison. The only negative thing I can think of for having a replacement is age. I waited for 3 years, until I hit 50, to go ahead. If I were 45 then I'd have to think much harder about the options.