Home › Blog › “Amazing”- An Advanced Stem Cell Disc Injection Patient

I often get great reports of amazing recoveries. I get asked by my patients to write about more of these on the blog. However, I get busy juggling all that I do every day so they often fail to get written up. So this morning we’ll cover an amazing recovery for a chronic low back pain patient.

Jake’s Story

Jake is a patient I met more than 16 years ago, who hurt his spine in a car crash while in his 20s. While treating and getting to know Jake I watched him mature from a college kid to become a father and accountant. At first, as he became a busy professional like clockwork Jake would need to get has back injected with epidural steroids. I could help him for a while, but as our practice advanced to ditching the steroids in favor of using the growth factors isolated from their own blood platelets (platelet lysate), he got longer and longer relief.

As time when on, he would come in every year for his platelet lysate epidural injection to get him ready for the 90 hour work weeks of tax season. Then around 2009, his need for these injections escalated. At that point, I finally offered him a disc stem cell injection.

The focus then was a large disc bulge with a tear at L5-S1. He had his first disc stem cell injection in late 2009, and by early 2010 was doing great. His post-injection MRI showed that the disc bulge had gone away, so at that point, he didn’t need much other than medical marijuana. His results are shown to the left here.

In 2015, a follow-up MRI at 6 years after the first procedure showed that while the injected L5-S1 was doing great, two new discs above that had developed bulges with tears. Hence, he needed something more.

You may want to learn more about injecting low back discs with stem cells in my video below:

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Cayman Disc Treatment

What’s different about what we can do in Cayman? A US same-day stem cell treatment for low back discs works well when there is a tear in the disc. However, if the goal is to get rid of a stubborn disc bulge that’s causing the patient ongoing problems (many don’t, but some do), then we often use special culture-expanded cells. This procedure is now part of a phase II FDA approved clinical trial approval but can be used in the Cayman Islands now. The cells are conditioned in culture to be able to withstand the rigors of the degenerating disc while they are also grown to bigger numbers.

Jake wanted to travel to Grand Cayman to get this done. This was new territory, as we had never injected so many discs in one patient. At about a month out, this was his report through my assistant:

“Dr. Centeno,

I spoke with Jake S today, he wanted me to pass along a BIG THANK YOU!! You have fulfilled his Christmas wish.  After 7 days, he was able to discontinue the narcotics and there is NO PAIN!! He is able to touch the floor with no pain.  He wanted to let you know how awesome you are and you’re a miracle worker!!”

So an initial great result from that more advanced stem cell disc injection. However, by 2017 we needed to repeat the procedure, reinjecting L5-S1. So how is Jake doing four years later in 2021? He recently sent this:

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