http://wcbstv.com/topstories/healthwatch.stem.cells.2.1752737.html

Medical research keeps finding amazing uses for stem cells, for everything from repairing heart damage to helping aging faces look younger. Now stem cells may be useful in avoiding some hip replacements.

First off, these are not the controversial embryonic stem cells but the patient's own adult stem cells. In this case, the stem cells grow new bone and blood vessels to repair a hip that's literally dying, and in some cases, the recuperation is nothing short of amazing.

These days Cheryl Flemming gets around very well, a far cry from the shape she was in about two years ago. She had a serious flare up of an intestinal condition when things got worse.

"I had excruciating pain in my right hip. I hear a pop and that is when I called her. I could not move my right foot," said Cheryl Flemming.

The cortisone-like steroids Cheryl had been given for her intestinal condition had caused another problem, something called avascular necrosis of the hip.

"There is a problem with the blood supply to the bone in the hip and as a result of that the bone dies. And as the bone dies it becomes removed by cells in the body and the hip will collapse. Many patients go on to need total hip replacement as a result of this," said Dr. Thomas Einhorn of Boston University Medical Center.

In fact, almost one in six hip replacements done in this country are as a result of this condition, abbreviated as AVN. And treatments have been largely ineffective or very invasive.

But a few years ago, Dr. Einhorn learned a procedure in Europe that used a patients own stem cells to repair their hip. "The idea being that those cells would make bone, they would recruit cells that make blood vessels and can restore the blood supply, and in doing so, recreate live bone in the femoral head of the hip, preventing it from going on to collapse," he said.

Here's how it works: In the O.R., Dr. Einhorn pulls out about six ounces of bone marrow from the patients pelvis through a small, quarter inch incision. He then spins it down in a centrifuge to concentrate the stem cells and then through another tiny incision, injects these cells back into the patient through a small drill hole in the dying hip.

Is it successful? Cheryl had her stem cell hip done about two years ago. And she has now run two marathons.

"My hips feel like they are normal. Before I had avascular necrosis, I bend, I stoop, I do my exercises without pain," Cheryl said.

Dr. Einhorn has been doing this procedure in a clinical trial for about three years now and he says, in carefully selected patients, meaning those in whom the AVN of the hip hasn't gone so far that the entire hip has collapsed.

He's achieved about an 85-percent success rate, not just avoiding hip replacement, but a number of patients who have gone back to being athletes.

June 15, 2010 (CBS)