Home › Blog › 21 Month Follow-up on the Arthritic Knee of an Athlete Treated with Stem Cells Instead of Knee Replacement



Quick note this afternoon.  Haven’t had as much time to blog this last few weeks due to administrative and other duties.  This is a 21 month follow-up MRI on a high level athlete who has had a partial clinical response (40% improvement with return to high level competition as a result of the therapy).  He had severe loss of cartilage in the above pre-stem cell injection MRI and then much better cartilage signal in the post-stem cell injection picture (below-21 months later).  The MRI scanners are not as closely matched as some of our study patients, but the changes looked solid, so I thought I’d place them on the site.  This patient was told he needed a knee replacement and instead had stem cell injected into his knee. he went from not competing to returning to high level competition.  He will be returning for further treatment.

(Please note, this patient was treated with the Regenexx-C cultured stem cell procedure and not Regenexx-SD.  While Regenexx-SD does rely on the same stem cell type that was used to treat these patients and other clinics have reported good results using similar procedures that don’t rely on stem cell culturing, Regenexx-SD clinical effectiveness has not yet been established. As always, not all knee patients would be expected to get these same results.)

Chris Centeno, MD is a specialist in regenerative medicine and the new field of Interventional Orthopedics. Centeno pioneered orthopedic stem cell procedures in 2005 and is responsible for a large amount of the published research on stem cell use for orthopedic applications. View Profile