Home › Blog › Does a Second Stem Cell Injection for Knee Arthritis Help?

Thinking About a Second Stem Cell Injection? Watch This…

I often get asked if a second stem cell injection for knee arthritis will add anything to the results of the first procedure. If we were like every other little clinic popping up, using a simple, automated bedside centrifuge that poorly concentrates bone marrow stem cells, I’d have no idea. However, our data mining of our advanced treatment registry provided that answer last year-a second knee stem cell procedure does give most patients a boost. But if you’re not into data with graphs and charts and instead connect with people, check out this video from a Regenexx patient.

This woman was treated by Rob Kramberg in NY/NJ. She was featured after her first knee stem cell procedure on this blog after a stem cell injection for patello-femoral syndrome with early arthritis. This knee cap problem can be caused by many things including problems in the low back, hip, or foot/ankle. Basically the knee cap fails to track correctly in it’s groove, causing too much wear and tear on one side, breaking down the slick cartilage that keeps it sliding. However, once the problem “sets in”, the cartilage under the knee cap also needs attention, which is why precise stem cell injections were used in this patient.

The patient had her first Regenexx-SD on 2/6/14 and did well by the look of the video she shared with Dr. Kramberg. However, her second procedure on 8/5/14 looks it boosted her to a new level, as she’s hitting Cross Fit hard in the new video above! So what happened? We take for granted that the normal knee has a very specific micro-environment that allows the cartilage and natural stem cells inside in it to do their job and thrive. However, the arthritic knee quickly becomes a toxic stew of nasty chemicals that kill off cartilage and native stem cells or just make their lives miserable. To use an analogy, if you were a cell inside a healthy knee it would be like hiking in the Rocky Mountains with clean fresh air and streams. If you were a cell in an arthritic knee, it would be like hiking with a gas mask during Beijing’s worse smog day. So the first procedure likely helped make the environment of the knee better for the second procedure.

The upshot? Because only Regenexx has a national database of thousands of treated patients to tell us the best way to maximize your outcome, only we can tell you that a second proprietary stem cell procedure is more likely than not to further help your knee arthritis. However, if graphs and statistics bore you, then just a quick glance at the video above will get the point across. If a picture is worth a thousand words, than a cross fit video is worth 10,000!

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