Hyderabad: Sports persons suffering from
knee injuries can greatly benefit from the advanced 'Cartilage
Cell Implantation' technology, Orthopaedic surgeon and sports
medicine expert, Dr Anant Joshi said on Sunday.
In sports, joints are extensively overused and this leads
to lot of injury to the joint surfaces. "Unfortunately for all
these years we in India were unable to offer a definitive
method of treatment for these kinds of problems for sports
people," Joshi told reporters here.
Joshi, who was part of an expert team of orthopaedic
surgeons who performed the first two Cartilage Cell
Implantation surgeries (for treating arthritis of knee joints)
in Andhra Pradesh on two youths at the Sai Institute of Sports
Injury and Arthroscopy (SISA) here, announced the success of
the operations.
"I think this technology is a great boon for athletes and
people who damage their joints in sports because these are all
young people and definitely radical treatment is not advisable
for them," he said.
"This kind of treatment which will conserve their joints
and prolong the life of their joints is going to be a great
boon for sports persons," Joshi asserted.
Even in Indian sports like Kabbadi, there is lot of
contact of hard surfaces and the joint lining can get
chipped-off which needs to be replaced and we have a method to
replace this lining today through 'Cartilage Cell
Implantation', Joshi said.
According to SISA consultant orthopaedic and
arthroscopic surgeon Dr Raghuveer Reddy, Cartilage Cell
Implantation or Cell therapy is useful to all those young and
middle aged patients whose cartilage is damaged due to trauma,
overuse, sports injuries, cartilage disease and early
arthritis.
Cell Therapy involves harvesting of a biopsy of the
cartilage from patients knee joint by arthroscopic method,
Reddy said adding, "this biopsy is cultured for six weeks in a
laboratory and re-injected back on the injured part and
patients can get back knee joint movements by the sixth week
of transplantation."
In India very few such surgeries have been carried out
and even the cell culture which was till done only in abroad
has recently started in our country also, he said.
Now, the whole surgery can cost only one-sixth costs of
similar surgeries performed in countries like US and
Australia, Reddy said.
Bureau Report
First Published: Sunday, September 27, 2009, 19:50