Home › Blog › Another Good Report on HTO: Fixing abnormal Alignment can Help Walking

While our goal with using stem cell injections is always to help patients avoid knee surgery and as a practice to continue to lead the development of new technologies that will allow more patients to avoid knee surgery, the data on one common knee surgery, high tibial osteotomy, is looking better and better. This is in contrast to other studies showing other common orthopedic surgery procedures such as knee menisectomy and debridement don’t provide measurable benefits and may worsen knee arthritis. High Tibial Osteotomy is performed when the patient has a severe varus or valgus alignment problem (side bend knee or bow legged/knock kneed). Some studies have recently shown better survival of cartilage on the side of the knee where pressure is relieved by the HTO surgery. Other studies reviewed on the blog have shown that returning to high impact sports after HTO knee surgery may or may not be possible given high tibial osteotomy recovery depending how you read the tea leaves. Now a new study out this week also shows improvement in walking biomechanics for these patients operated with HTO knee surgery. So while we’re not big fans of many common joint surgeries, there seems to be mounting evidence that HTO knee surgery helps patients.

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