Are we really any nearer to being able to regrow cartilage in the knee? YKC’s Nick London is excited by the science and frustrated by the often sensationalist reporting of it.

“Scientists have found a way to regrow cartilage and stop arthritis.” It feels as though we see a story like this every month. Certainly, I can remember cartilage regrowth being “just around the corner” back when I was at medical school. And that was a while ago.

So are we actually any nearer to being able to regrow cartilage, and why is that the Holy Grail of orthopaedics?

Let’s answer that second question first.

Cartilage, and why it matters

Osteoarthritis in your knee or any other joint is the result of the wearing away of a particular type of cartilage known as articular cartilage. This smooth substance coats the ends of your bones and enables them to glide together in a frictionless way. The cartilage also helps to distribute load across the surface of your bones and acts as a shock absorber.

If the articular cartilage starts to wear away, the bone becomes exposed. That means more friction, no shock absorption and, over time as bone grinds on bone, a lot more pain.

You can see the effects of osteoarthritis in this video by my YKC colleague, Dave Duffy.

Cartilage doesn’t lend itself to regrowth. There’s very little blood supply and no stem cells, so it doesn’t heal in the way other parts of your body do. That’s why the gold standard for dealing with advanced osteoarthritis has long been knee resurfacing (aka knee replacement).

If we could regrow cartilage in a risk-free way, we wouldn’t need artificial implants, we could cut the risk of treatment, and that would mean we could probably treat many more people earlier.

Who wouldn’t want that?

Are we any nearer to regrowing cartilage?

There’s just one problem: at present, the news of success in regrowing cartilage has come from a lab. It’s been trialled in mice and on human cells, but it’s not yet been trialled in humans.

This then, is very early stage stuff: promising – and hugely welcome if the potential becomes reality in human subjects – but to suggest it’s a miracle cure at this stage is just sensationalism.

As the Science Daily article itself notes: “The findings suggest that cartilage lost due to aging or arthritis may one day be restored using either a pill or a targeted injection.”

That phrase “may one day” is doing a lot of heavy lifting. We may one day be walking on Mars, but it’s a way off.

Stop the sensationalism

This is important research, because anything that can help patients to slow, stop or even reverse the effects of cartilage loss in aging joints is valuable. But any suggestion that such treatments are just around the corner is unfair to patients. We can be entirely supportive of the science while being critical of the reporting of it.

So can we regrow cartilage in patients with osteoarthritis? Not right now. Maybe not ever. But if this or any other solution is out there, it’s many years away.

Are you suffering with osteoarthritis? There’s a proven solution available now. Please get in touch or phone us on 03453 052 579.

> Discover more about Nick London
> Discover more about osteoarthritis, symptoms & treatments
> Discover more about partial or total knee replacements