[Source: Daily Mail UK]
Five-a-side footballer John explains how injections taken from his abdomen helped end his joint pain
A new procedure for knee pain involves injections of fat taken from the abdomen. John Wakefield, 57, a retail worker from Shiptonthorpe, North Yorkshire, underwent the treatment, as he tells ADRIAN MONTI.
THE PATIENT
For most of my life I’ve been active and I played five-a-side football a few times a week for 16 years. But in August 2016 I suffered a sudden shooting pain inside my right knee while at work.
This was followed by a feeling of heat deep inside the knee that didn’t go away.
I’d played football the evening before and thought that had caused it — I’d never had serious knee pain before.
That evening, I wrapped an ice pack round it, rested, then saw my GP a week later. I was referred for an MRI scan, which showed a tear in the cartilage lining the knee joint.
An NHS knee specialist told me it probably happened during football. He said the flap of torn cartilage was catching on the joint whenever I moved my knee, causing the pain, and advised I could have microfracture treatment — tiny fractures are made on the surface of the bone in the knee, causing it to bleed. Once it scabs over, new cartilage forms.
Another consultant I saw privately for a second opinion said this might not work, as the new cartilage could break down in the future. Instead, he said it might heal on its own as it was quite a small tear. I agreed this might be best.
I’d stopped playing football but the pain affected other parts of my life. Sometimes I walked with a slight limp. I rested the knee whenever I could and had some physiotherapy but it had no real effect. I took painkillers occasionally.
While I was waiting for my right knee to get better, the left one started hurting — I was probably shifting my weight onto it to avoid damaging my right. By last October I was feeling a grinding pain whenever I walked, but an MRI scan couldn’t find any obvious cause.
In June this year I read online that a new treatment called Lipogems was being offered in London by Professor Adrian Wilson, so I went to see him. It involves having fat extracted from your tummy which is processed and then injected into the joint. A healing response is triggered by a type of stem cell called pre-stem cells from the fat to repair the injury.
Professor Wilson took MRI scans of both my knees and said I had damage to the cartilage in my joints — the start of arthritis. He said Lipogems could possibly help.
... cont.
Full article can be read at https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-4986304/Fat-cells-tummy-fix-creaky-knees.html
