When it comes to joint health, cartilage has no small amount of influence. For starters, this protective soft tissue covers the bones inside your joint, allowing them to glide together smoothly for optimal function.
As important as this tissue is, much of your cartilage has no way to regenerate itself because it lacks a direct supply of blood. And this is where cartilage restoration comes in, finding ways to replace damaged or missing cartilage.
Our team of board-certified orthopedic surgeons at New Braunfels Orthopaedic Surgery & Sports Medicine in New Braunfels, Texas, has one overriding goal: to help patients move without pain. There are many ways in which we accomplish this, and cartilage restoration is one, which we review here.
In most cases, cartilage restoration works best for acute injuries in younger people and not for degenerative conditions like osteoarthritis (OA). This is because OA is progressive, and it can damage cartilage beyond repair. For single lesions and injuries, however, cartilage restoration can be very effective.
As an example, let’s take a look at knee injuries. This is where most cartilage restoration efforts are focused, though we can use this treatment for other major joints like your shoulders and elbows.
Let’s say a person tears a meniscus in their knee (which is cartilage). In addition to the meniscus damage, the odds are fairly high that there’s also damage to the hyaline cartilage that covers the bones inside the knee.
To repair this damage and to facilitate cartilage regeneration, we have several techniques we can use to approach cartilage restoration.
If you have cartilage damage due to injury, we offer various procedures that are designed to restore cartilage, including:
With this technique, we use a sharp tool to create small holes in the surface of the bone that’s lost the protective cartilage. These holes create a healing response in your body that encourages the production of fibrocartilage that repairs the damage.
Bear in mind that this type of cartilage is weaker than the hyaline cartilage it’s replacing, but it can restore pain-free movement.
This is very similar to microfracture in that we make small holes in the bones to elicit a regenerative response in the form of fibrocartilage.
ACI is an innovative technique in which we harvest healthy cartilage cells called chondrocytes from your joint, which we send off to a lab for incubation and growth. After 3-5 weeks, when these cells have multiplied, we implant them into your damaged joint to grow healthier cartilage.
This is another way in which we can use cartilage from your own body to repair the damage. In more detail, we harvest a graft of healthy cartilage and bone from a non-weightbearing area of your body and press it into the damaged area. Because we’re using your body’s resources, we call this an autograft transplantation.
We can also use donor cartilage from cadavers, which is called allograft transplantation.
When you’re ready to learn more about cartilage restoration and whether you’re a candidate for this approach to restoring joint health, contact New Braunfels Orthopaedic Surgery & Sports Medicine. You can call the office at 830-341-1386 or use our online form to request an appointment anytime.
