Background
Knee osteoarthritis (OA) is a chronic and progressive degenerative disease. It resulted from mechanical and chemical disorders that damage the joint and the underlying bone. The management of knee OA is challenging due to poor self-regeneration of connective tissues. Surgical treatment with prolotherapy approaches was conducted to treat medial compartment knee OA.
Aim
To know the injection frequency to reach a 50% improvement in VAS score and WOMAC index.
Methods
Six patients who suffered from late-stage medial compartment knee OA underwent PFO followed by twelve sessions of intra-articular dextrose prolotherapy. The subjective pain score, visual analog scale (VAS), was assessed based on the patient subjectiveness before and after treatment. Patients marked the score from 0 to 10 cm to describe the current pain state. The functional index, the Western Ontario and McMaster Universities Osteoarthritis (WOMAC) index used to evaluate the Patient’s clinical symptoms. It ranges from 0 to 96 points consisting of three main sections: pain (total 20 points), stiffness (total: eight points), and physical function disability (total 68 points). Higher scores indicate severe symptoms and function.
Results
Four patients showed pain relief and functional improvement with more than 50% scores of VAS and WOMAC after the treatment. Two patients received more than twelve doses of intra-articular dextrose prolotherapy due to a lack of progress.
Conclusion
This study provides clinical evidence for a new treatment strategy for advanced knee OA. This combined therapy improves the patient’s daily activity function and postpones the need for total knee arthroplasty (TKA).
One of the most common injuries in orthopaedic field is anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) tear, which accounts for more than 50% of all knee injuries and has an estimated incidence rate of 60.9 per 100,000 persons. Untreated ACL injuries may lead to postural instability, increase in meniscal injury rates, and osteoarthritis that develops more gradually. The gold standard treatment for ACL tears is arthroscopic reconstruction using an autograft or allograft tendon. However, graft failure during an ACL reconstruction (ACLR) can considerably delay recovery and lead to revision ACLR operation that has worse prognosis. A number of regenerative techniques, including stem cells, biomaterials, and bioactive compounds, have been researched and shown to be efficient. The injection of stem cells as biological augmentation has been suggested as a method to enhance the results of ACLR. Mesenchymal stem cells (MSC) in particular can differentiate into a number of terminally differentiated progenitors that can be used to create mesenchymal-derived tissues and to speed up the healing process by influence the microenvironment to promote angiogenesis, promote regeneration, and prevent the formation of scar tissue. The goal of this study is to outline the present use of stem cells as an augmentation in ACLR.
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