Have you been told that your knee cartilage is shot? Your cartilage is soft tissue that covers the bones of your joints so the bones don’t rub together. When you have arthritis, your cartilage has years of wear and tear. It thins and loses its protective function around your joints. Now, you have some or all the classic symptoms of arthritis: joint pain, stiffness, loss of mobility, and swelling.
Tendonitis can also damage your cartilage. If you have chronic tendonitis, you lose mobility and strength in your joint as tiny tears can grow. You can also sustain cartilage damage from an accident.
Our board-certified orthopedic surgeon, Dr. Jonathan Shults, with Coastal Empire Orthopedics, stays abreast of the latest developments in the treatment of damaged cartilage. We use regenerative medicine to help ease arthritis pain and other soft tissue injuries, such as tendonitis or sprains.
Cartilage in adults doesn’t naturally repair itself by generating new cells that form new tissue. Your cartilage isn’t vascularized, meaning no blood vessels carry proteins and other nutrients into the soft tissue. Cells need blood to regenerate.
The wear and tear on cartilage around joints is the reason for many knee and hip replacements. Researchers have been working for years to try to find a way to help damaged and torn cartilage repair itself. The efforts are beginning to bear fruit.
Northwestern University announced in August 2024 that they have created a new biomaterial that has regrown cartilage in animals’ knee joints. It contains a peptide with a protein key to cartilage growth and a modified form of hyaluronic acid.
Hyaluronic acid is a lubricant around your joints. It diminishes as you age, one of several factors that cause cartilage deterioration.
In the future, researchers are hopeful that the new biomaterial could be used to repair damaged cartilage in humans and prevent knee and hip replacements, revolutionizing orthopedics.
Other research universities are also working on the problem. Stanford University is working on trying to stop skeletal cells from turning into bone by stopping their growth at the cartilage stage.
Dr. Shults uses regenerative medicine to bring fresh, healthy cells to the site of your soft tissue damage to speed up healing of your painful joint. Platelet-rich plasma (PRP) contains large masses of blood platelets that we inject at the site of your pain. The platelets contain a huge supply of healing nutrients that help you heal.
You may be a candidate for stem cell therapy. We gather stem cells from your body or a donor and inject them into your damaged joint. The healthy cells help stimulate healing and reduce pain.
We can also help stimulate the growth of new tissue around a joint through a method called microfracture. Dr. Shults uses an instrument to create tiny openings in the surface of your joint. Your body rushes fresh new cells to the wound, which becomes a fibrocartilage substance. It helps form a cushion between your bones. It’s not as efficient as cartilage, but it helps ease the friction causing your pain.
In addition, we use minimally invasive arthroscopy to clip any torn, loose cartilage causing pain and boost it with PRP. We can also transfer healthy cartilage from another area of your body and place it at the damaged site.
