Home › Blog › Hiking Up Pikes Peak with Knee Arthritis after Stem Cells

Hiking Up Pikes Peak with Knee arthritis after Stem Cells….  Can stem cells help severe knee arthritis enough to allow someone to climb a 14 thousand foot peak? BL is a 64 year old man with increasing knee pain after 3 knee surgeries on the right knee and 5 on the left knee. Just before seeing us late last year to see if a knee arthritis stem cell procedure might help, he had to have 115 cc of fluid aspirated from his knee (that’s a really big swollen knee!) He had tried viscosupplementation (Hyalgan shots) years before with the first round lasting 3 years, the second 9 months, and the third only 8 months. He had also tried acupuncture with minimal relief. Despite his main medial and lateral compartments looking pretty good, he was told that he was a knee replacement candidate based on the arthritis under his knee cap. His MRI showed grade 4 loss of cartilage (i.e. none left) in the patellofemoral joint whereas he had much less cartilage loss on the medial side of the main knee joint. He underwent a Regenexx-SD stem cell procedure on 3/23/12 and contacted us this week to let us know his progress. At 5 months post treatment he reports no knee pain and recently completed the “Pikes Peak Challenge”; a hike up Pike’s peak outside of Colorado Springs. That’s an 8,400 foot vertical gain up a 14,115 foot peak! (course above) It’s great to hear that BL is doing so well.  Not everyone should expect those kind of results.  I would have pegged him as a poor candidate based on the extent of his cartilage loss and we can’t rule out that he may need update treatments in the future. In the meantime, I’m humbled just looking at the picture above…

NOTE:  Regenexx-SD is a medical procedure and like all medical procedure has a success and failure rate.  Not all patients experience the same result.

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