Who is the ideal candidate for a cartilage transplant?
Dr. Cole: The first criterion is that people are relatively young. It’s not necessary chronology, but physiology in terms of their age. What I mean by that is when we’re in general talking about age, we’re trying to help people who would otherwise be considered too young for a joint replacement. That’s because the joint replacement won’t last forever. They ultimately may require another one and sometimes even two more, so the results go down in terms of the predictability of the outcome. The other issue is that we don’t necessarily discriminate by age, but by the time patients reach, say 45 to 50 years of age, they typically have too much arthritis to be able to treat with the procedures that we’re dealing with here. Fortunately, those patients make good candidates for joint replacement, so the typical age group that we’re able to treat is generally someone less than 50, often less than 45, who has limited areas of cartilage loss. Understand that the hard cartilage is the articular car
