Regenerative Medicine: Why It's a Game-Changer for Those Suffering From Arthritis

Some days are better than others, but most involve some degree of joint pain thanks to arthritis. If your life is becoming increasingly limited by joint pain and inflammation, you’re most certainly not alone — slightly more than 1 in 5 adults in the United States has arthritis.

What many of these people, and likely you, have in common is that solutions for your arthritis have fallen short. This is because there is no cure for arthritis, which makes symptom management the primary approach.

Our team here at Revive Spine and Pain Center certainly understands the challenges when it comes to finding workable solutions for arthritis. That’s why we’re so pleased to offer regenerative medicine, which many are calling a game-changer. 

Here’s a look at the benefits of focusing on regeneration rather than managing symptoms when you have arthritis.

The hurdles to treating arthritis

There are more than 100 different types of arthritis, and our focus is on degenerative types, with osteoarthritis (OA) heading the list. OA is, by far, the most common type of arthritis — nearly 530 million people around the globe have OA, including more than 32.5 million here in the US.

Your joints function best when there’s plenty of articular cartilage covering the bones. These slippery tissues protect and lubricate your joint, as well as promote smooth gliding between the bones. 

With osteoarthritis, these tissues break down, and when this happens, there’s more friction inside your joint. This friction then leads to the pain, inflammation, and stiffness that are the hallmarks of OA.

The problem is that once your cartilage breaks down, it doesn't grow back. This is because your cartilage doesn't have a strong network of blood vessels that can bring in the necessary resources to rebuild.

Introducing new resources through regenerative medicine

With regenerative medicine, our goal is to introduce the resources the tissues in your joints need to rebuild. There are two ways in which we can  encourage regeneration:

Platelet-rich plasma (PRP) therapy

Your body has an incredibly strong healing system that’s divided into four parts:

• Homeostasis
• Inflammation
• Cell proliferation
• Remodeling

What kicks off this healing cascade are the platelets in your blood, which form clots to stop the bleeding (if necessary) and then release growth factors to initiate healing and repair. 

With PRP therapy, we harvest your own platelets and create a concentrate of these cells. We  then inject the PRP concentrate into your damaged tissues so it can create a healing environment that controls pain and inflammation, as well as encourage cellular turnover.

Bone marrow aspirate concentrate (BMAC)

The other form of regenerative medicine that we use for arthritis is BMAC. This treatment focuses on harvesting stem cells from your own bone marrow. These cells are ideal for regeneration as they can become other cells and multiply as that cell. In fact, all humans are created in the embryo from stem cells.

Adult stem cells are less powerful than embryonic ones, but they can still play an invaluable role in regenerating damaged and lost tissues.

With both of these regenerative treatments, we’re using your body’s own resources to stimulate healing, so your body readily accepts both PRP and BMAC.

As you can see, taking a regenerative approach to your joint issues, rather than a symptom-by-symptom one, can very much be a game-changer.

If you’d like to see whether regenerative medicine can help with your arthritis, please contact us at one of our New Jersey locations in Marlton, Hamilton Township, Northfield, or East Brunswick to schedule a consultation.