Home › Blog › #SatStats- Avoid Knee Replacement with Stem Cells?

It’s #SatStats again, a chance for our readers to participate in our research and win stuff. Most patients that we see want to avoid knee replacement with stem cells. Having said that, there’s little data published to show how many patients can actually accomplish the goal of avoiding knee replacement. Unlike everyone else, our advanced registry tracking system captures this data.

About 2/3rds of the knee patients we see are knee replacement candidates trying to avoid that surgery. This means that they have lost enough cartilage where the only traditional surgical option is to replace the joint. The problem with knee replacement surgery is that it’s invasive and carries serious risks. These include things like much higher likelihood of a heart attack or stroke after the surgery. In addition, a surprising number of patients still have significant pain even after knee replacement.

Once the knee gets to this point, for almost all patients tracked for a number of years, we’d expect to see high rates of knee replacement surgery. This week I began to look at that data. Our treatment registry staff sends validated questionnaires at set time points and when we find that a patient needed a knee replacement despite their stem cell injection, we exit a patient from being tracked in our system.

So what’s that number? What percentage of patients out of about 1,000 treated with our Regenexx-SD procedure still needed a knee replacement? Given that most of these patients  would have needed the surgery without stem cells over 4 years, putting any dent in the number of invasive surgeries would be a big win. If you’re so inclined, we had once before reported what this number looked like in a past, published research study.

The upshot? Guess the percentage of patients that still needed a knee replacement for #SatStats. The reader with the closest guess will win $1,000 off a Colorado Regenexx-SD procedure for their knee or that of a loved one. Tweet you answers to #StatSat or comment on our Regenexx Facebook page. I’ll report the results on Monday!

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