London Cartilage Clinic
Explore expert articles on cartilage care, regenerative treatments, and practical recovery advice from our specialist team.
Standard steroid injections at the thumb base provide four to five months of relief, with effects diminishing on repeat use; ChondroFiller, an injectable collagen scaffold administered as an outpatient, recruits the body's own progenitor cells to repair cartilage, with prospective evidence of sustained improvements over two years and no adverse events.
Untreated, knee osteoarthritis becomes a self-amplifying cascade: cartilage has no blood vessels to support repair whilst enzymes dissolve it faster than chondrocytes can rebuild.
ChondroFiller is an outpatient injection suitable for most adults with cartilage damage, including those 60 and beyond with advanced osteoarthritis, by deploying a collagen scaffold that recruits the body's own cells to repair the joint.
Eligibility for NHS-funded MACI requires all four NICE criteria to be met: no previous cartilage surgery, minimal osteoarthritis, a defect exceeding 2 cm², and treatment at a tertiary referral centre.
An ACL tear causes irreversible cartilage damage within fractions of a second—bone compression kills the cells that maintain cartilage structure. Instability and biochemical cascades then drive years of silent degeneration that surgery does not arrest.
70–85% of appropriately selected patients with focal cartilage defects achieve lasting symptom relief from ChondroFiller over three to five years. Functional gains plateau within six months, whilst structural repair continues maturing on MRI.
