Carticel research results

There continues to be greater research done to support the long term effects of cartilage replacement. There are always two sides to every story and I have come across some positive and some not-so-positive articles to support this claim. At the end of the day though I am still hands down happy that I did decide to go through with the Carticel procedure. I am only 8 months into my recovery but I can say that my quality of life has been vastly improved from before the surgery. I cannot run, but that is not a goal of mine. I want to make sure I can walk (as simple as it sounds, it hasn't been easy as of late), chase my kids around, bike, hike, do yoga, be comfortable working out, I have no plans of running a marathon. This surgery, for me at least, wasn't an action to return to the athletic life I had before, it was to continue to lead the life that is ahead of me, and to NOT have a knee replacement at age 40. I will touch on whether or not Carticel is the right procedure for you in another post. I have pasted a few snippets of articles I found, the appropriate links are also included to take you to the full article.

An article earlier this year from Hays Pharmaceutical states: "The findings show that nearly 90 per cent of patients using the drug saw an improvement in their knee function and that this continued for almost ten years...These data suggest that the ACI technique not only works, but when it works, the results will last for a long time."
(view full article)

An article on rxlist.com goes into detail about the most common adverse effects of the surgery:
"The most common serious adverse events (> 5% of patients), derived from the STAR(Study of the Treatment of Articular Repair) study include arthrofibrosis/joint adhesion, graft overgrowth, chondromalacia or chondrosis, cartilage injury, graft complication, meniscal lesion and graft delamination. Only serious adverse events were collected in this study." (see list below for greater detail)