Dr. J. Michael Bennett is a Board Certified Orthopedic Surgeon and a Fellowship Trained Sports Medicine Doctor serving patients in Katy, Rosenberg, Fort Bend County and Southeast Texas from offices in Houston, near the Houston Galleria, and Sugar Land, TX. Call our offices at 281-633-8600 to schedule an evaluation.
This article is based on an interview with Dr. Bennett:
We’re talking about elbows and about cartilage transfers or cartilage transplants. Sometimes you have a young patient who has an isolated lesion. There are some lesions called osteochondritis dissecans that can occur in kids who are skeletally immature. This happens especially in throwers where the cartilage starts to collapse or fragment.
When this cartilage damage occurs, it can lead to early arthritis and can cause problems with popping, clicking and locking of the elbow. Typically what doctors used to do is take those little fragments out and that was it. There was no way to really repair the damage, doctors just removed the debris.
Nowdays, we like to remove the fragments arthroscopically, and then through a small incision, we’ll go in to the elbow joint and do a bone plug. This is called an OATS or Osteochondral Autograft Transfer System. We take a small plug of cartilage from the knee and transfer it to the elbow where the defect is. I’ve done some of these procedures and the patients have done very well, but you have to have the right indications to do it.
Another option is the ACI or Autologous Chondrocyte Implantation, where we take a biopsy of cartilage at the initial arthroscopic surgery, and we send off that piece of cartilage for the cartilage cells to be replicated. The lab grows new cartilage cells and hey send those cells back to us. We then have a secondary procedure where we go in and plant those cells within that defect so the defect heals. So it’s a two part procedure — first use the arthroscope to remove a piece of cartilage and then use that cartilage sample to grow additional cartilage cells to be implanted back into the elbow cartilage defect. So the difference between the OATS and the ACI, is that the OATS is a one-stage and ACI is a two stage procedure. Both of them allow you to repair the cartilage lesion and restore your cartilage, which is in the younger patients’ best interests.
Remember, it you’re experiencing pain, stiffness or a restriction in the normal range of elbow motion, please call 281-633-8600 for an evaluation. The longer you wait to be treated, the more expensive and invasive the treatment will likely be.
