More than 6 million people every year go to see a doctor about their knees. A substantial portion of those doctor's visits are due not to problems with bones or muscles, but with cartilage. Cartilage injuries can be longstanding and painful, according to C. Thomas Vangsness Jr., associate professor of orthopaedic surgery at USC , but there are new alternatives available to possibly help repair the cartilage and relieve the hurt. And it bears almost all of the body's weight as it moves. The knee's complexity also makes it an easy target for injury.
Damage can range from a slim crack to a craggy fracture, from a rough abraded area to a torn flap.
Those with such damage generally suffer from pain, locking, clicking and swelling in the knee. This damaging condition often progresses with increasing pain if left untreated. Surgeons have used arthroscopic surgery to help such patients for some time. Now surgeons can remove a bit of the patient's own existing localized cartilage and use it to grow millions of new cloned cartilage cells in the laboratory. Then they insert these cells back into the knee.