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Originally Posted by emk159

of anyone who had stem cell injections done to their knee to fix problems?

From Tehran

Patients and Methods:  Four patients with knee osteoarthritis were selected for the study. They were aged 55, 57, 65 and 54 years, and had moderate to severe knee OA. After their signed written consent, 30 mL of bone marrow were taken and cultured for MSC growth. After having enough MSCs in culture (4–5 weeks) and taking in consideration all safety measures, cells were injected in one knee of each patient.


Results:  The walking time for the pain to appear improved for three patients and remained unchanged for one. The number of stairs they could climb and the pain on visual analog scale improved for all of them. On physical examination, the improvement was mainly for crepitus. It was minor for the improvement of the range of motion.


Conclusion:  Results were encouraging, but not excellent.

and this

Methods: Twelve patients with chronic knee pain unresponsive to conservative treatments and radiologic evidence of osteoarthritis were treated with autologous expanded bone marrow MSCs by intra-articular injection (40×106 cells). Clinical outcomes were followed for 1 year and included evaluations of pain, disability, and quality of life. Articular cartilage quality was assessed by quantitative magnetic resonance imaging T2 mapping.

Results: Feasibility and safety were confirmed, and strong indications of clinical efficacy were identified. Patients exhibited rapid and progressive improvement of algofunctional indices that approached 65% to 78% by 1 year. This outcome compares favorably with the results of conventional treatments. Additionally, quantification of cartilage quality by T2 relaxation measurements demonstrated a highly significant decrease of poor cartilage areas (on average, 27%), with improvement of cartilage quality in 11 of the 12 patients.

Conclusions: MSC therapy may be a valid alternative treatment for chronic knee osteoarthritis. The intervention is simple, does not require hospitalization or surgery, provides pain relief, and significantly improves cartilage quality.

and this

http://www.arthroscopyjournal.org/ar...884-1/abstract
and the only randomized comparison I found is

Treatment of Knee Osteoarthritis With Allogeneic Bone Marrow... : Transplantation

where the stem cell group did better than a sham injected group. All of these are small numbers and this is not standard care. While I do not know, I would not expect that an insurance company would pay for this as it is still experimental. It seems that the reports are done using your own stem cells, which would require them to be harvested first.