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Every once in awhile I provide treatment updates of patients we are actively seeing for stem cell treatment of their orthopedic conditions.  Thought I’d spend a few minutes talking about several patients who are receiving stem cell injections:

Jerry is a 66 year old male who had a left total hip replacement several years ago.  Regrettably, his cardiac problems lead to major complications with that big surgery, including stent placement and a prolonged and scary hospitalization.  He committed that when his other hip went bad, he would find another way to treat it.  We placed him in the FAIR category.  He’s here for his second re-inject on the right.  After the first re-inject, he has gone from not being able to drive well (due to right hip pain with moving his foot from brake to accelerator).  He just completed an 8 hour car trip without pain and has been on the gold courses of Phoenix proselytizing about his pain relief without surgery.

John is a 78 year white male with a an extensive medical history who has had two years of right knee pain with going down stairs.  He tried cortisone shots and SynVisc for his patello-femoral (knee cap) arthritis, with moderate short lived success.  On his MRI he had the most arthritis in the lower knee cap area (where we have been focusing his treatments), but also had meniscus issues.  He reports about 35% improvement after his first injections and is here for his second injections.

Carlo is a 22 year old white male with a congenital absence of the ACL, PCL, and fibula which lead to a below the knee amputation at age 9 months.  He is a very active amputee who participates in power lifting.  This knee began bothering him on a ski trip several years ago and ultimately led to being diagnosed with a medial meniscus tear.  This then lead to a partial mensectomy (partial removal of the torn part of the meniscus) under arthroscopy.  By the time we saw him, what was left of the medial meniscus was macerated and he had subchondral (below the cartilage) cysts on the other side of that knee.  He was told by surgeons that his ongoing surgical options were very limited at best.  He presented with some laxity of the LCL as well.  Our focus of treatment has been the LCL as well as that macerated medial meniscus.  After one treatment with re-injection of his own stem cells, he reports 100% improvement, i.e. no ongoing pain.

-Josh is a 32 year old white male with a 5 year history of a right knee meniscus tear.  He had no surgery and continued with daily pain with activity.  One month after his first injection of stem cells into the meniscus tear, pain is dramatically reduced and function is improved.

Frank is a 32 year old white male s/p left knee menisectomy with chronic knee pain with activity.  When performing any activity for more than a few minutes, the knee would be sore from several hours to days.  On his recent MRI he has evidence of a small remaining meniscus with significant bone bruising on the medial side and loss of cartilage.  Pain has gone from a 6/10 to 2/10 with limited pain after activity as a result of two injections of his own stem cells into that medial compartment and meniscus.

Over the two months we also had a treatment failure where we were unable to heal a large non-retracted and full thickness rotator cuff tear after two treatments.  For more info on likely reasons for treatment failures, click here.

These patients were treated with the Regenexx-C (cultured stem cell injections). In addition, this is a collection of positive outcomes. Patients who try this procedure also can see no or minimal 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