![]() Degenerative disc disease affects most people. It can occur at any age but is more common after the age of thirty and increases as we get older. What ultimately we want to do is learn to regrow cartilage in a manner so that we can actually cure the osteoarthritis.Chronic back pain is one of the most common conditions that affect people. We just proved that we are able to perform this procedure and that it can work to relieve pain. Well, this is just the tip of the iceberg. These stem cells have never been studied in that rigorous of a scientific fashion. The significance is that it's the first study to be conducted that is randomized and placebo controlled, in that the patients did not know whether or not they were receiving stem cells or a placebo control. ![]() They can go on to form things like bone, ligament, cartilage, things that make up the joints in our body. Stem cells are the building blocks of many types of adult human tissues. And we wanted to see whether or not it works to help treat knee pain from osteoarthritis. This is a procedure that we helped to develop over the last couple of years that has really expanded in the last couple of years, and is being used quite frequently now. We designed this study as a very early test of safety and feasibility. Our future studies will involve expanding the number of cells that we are able to administer patients at any one time and looking to see if we have MRI evidence of cartilage regrowth. This is very important because it forms the basis for our future clinical trials, as we try to regrow cartilage for knees that have osteoarthritis from stem cells. We found that the procedure produces a viable product which has stem cells in it and can be used to inject back into the patient's knees on the same day that they're harvested. We conducted this trial alongside FDA monitoring to determine if the procedure was safe and viable to perform for patients who have knee arthritis. I'm pleased to report the results of a clinical trial that we've recently conducted to test the effect of stem cells to treat knee pain from osteoarthritis. SHANE SHAPIRO: I'm Shane Shapiro, an Assistant Professor of Orthopedic Surgery at Mayo Clinic in Florida, and I lead our orthopedic regenerative medicine efforts on the Florida campus. Shapiro, M.D., a Mayo Clinic orthopedic physician. “Our findings can be interrupted in ways that we now need to test - one of which is that bone marrow stem cell injection in one ailing knee can relieve pain in both affected knees in a systemic or whole-body fashion,” says the study's lead author, Shane A. They are only able to conclude the procedure is safe to undergo as an option for knee pain, but they cannot yet recommend it for routine arthritis care. ![]() Given that the stem cell-treated knee was no better than the control-treated knee - both were dramatically better than before the study began - the researchers say the stem cells' effectiveness remains somewhat uninterpretable. ![]() Each of the 25 patients enrolled in the study had two bad knees, but did not know which knee received the stem cells. The findings in The American Journal of Sports Medicine represent another first -patients not only had a dramatic improvement in the knee that received stem cells, but also in their other knee, which also had painful arthritis but received only a saline control injection. offering one form of stem cell therapy or another to an estimated 100,000-plus patients, who pay thousands of dollars, out of pocket, for the treatment, which has not undergone demanding clinical study. The researchers say such testing is needed because there are at least 600 stem cell clinics in the U.S. It is the first time that the belief that stem cells can provide substantial and possible regenerative relief in an ailing joint has been put to the test in such a rigorous fashion. Researchers at Mayo Clinic's campus in Florida have conducted the world's first prospective, blinded and placebo-controlled clinical study to test the benefit of using bone marrow stem cells to reduce arthritic pain and disability in knees.
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