Home › Blog › Hip Arthritis Stem Cell Injection: 2.5 Years Later…

Hip arthritis has always been harder to treat with stem cells. However, despite that fact, we have helped quite a few patients through the years. Case in point this morning is Sheri who is two and a half years out from her hip arthritis stem cell injection.

Sheri was 51-years old when she presented to our clinic for treatment in July of 2012. At that point, she had progressively worse deep pain in the joint and groin over the preceding ten years. She had pain with strenuous or weight bearing activity or even standing for long periods of time and she was unable to lie on that side.  She had tried one cortisone injection that was helpful short term and had short-term help with P.T., ultrasound, and interferential current.

Sheri received the Regenexx-SD same day stem cell procedure in July of 2012 in Colorado. She contacted us a few weeks ago that while her hip was great for 2.5 years, she was starting to get some return of pain and wondered if we would take a look at her new MRI of the hip which is above. The most interesting difference is the large area of dead bone that was in the hip socket (dark area in the lighter bone on the left in the yellow dashed circle) which is no longer there on the recent hip MRI on the right. This bone area went from “on it’s way out” to having the normal bright MRI signal of healthy bone. How could this have happened? Given that we didn’t directly treat the bone (which we do sometimes), the only plausible explanation that I can come up with is improvement in the properties of her hip cartilage. The relationship between bone and cartilage is complex, but what happens to one often happens to the other. Bad cartilage can put too much pressure on bone causing it to die off and bad bone can stretch the cartilage leading to a hole.

The upshot? I’m impressed with Sheri’s results and like a good number of our patients, she will likely need an update treatment. We’ve spent many, many years perfecting our protocols and procedures and it’s good to see that these continuous tweaks and improvements seem to have helped Sheri’s hip!

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