Resolution of lumbar bone marrow oedema, page-58

Its been one year since my last pentosan treatment, so a bit of an update.

I have zero pain or discomfort from my arthritic back. I am ridiculously happy with the result. And through the last year I have been sustaining a high training load, in kickboxing and grappling, which really ask a great deal of lower back strength, mobility and flexibility.

I unfortunately suffered an unrelated injury, to my elbow (someone tried to tear my arm off, and largely succeeded, resulting in a high grade tear to the UCL ligament), so I have been back to my sports medicine specialist, this time to treat my elbow. But it was a great opportunity to follow up on my pentosan treatment.

We went through a range of manipulations and examination of my spine, all with full mobility and no pain. He reviewed my earlier imaging and remarked on just how dramatic the results were, not just on the elimination of the BMEs, but also the recession of the bulging discs that were impinging on my spinal cord.

I told him I had originally thought that I would be back again around now for another treatment, but it turns out I don't need it and in all honesty couldn't ask for it. So we had a discussion around retreatment schedules, which are basically unknown at this point so we could just treat whenever symptoms reappeared.

So I said I found the idea of prophylactic treatment very interesting. And he agreed. The safety profile is very good, you basically just see liver enzymes ALT transiently elevated, so there is little downside for potential benefit, and he felt for an individual in my situation it was a very sensible trade-off.

So I am doing another round of PPS treatment. This will be round number 3, with an interval of 1 year between rounds. I will do another round of imaging at the end, and will update here. I'm very happy to be doing a further course, based on all I know about the mechanism of action. I hope that this is early treatment that will forestall the development of any incipient arthritis elsewhere in my body, and improve the health of all my joints through increased stem cell activity, increased expression of collagen, hyaluronic acid and other extracellular matrix materials, suppression of inflammation, repair of intervertebral discs, and other effects we know about.

For the elbow, its a bad tear, and I'll be doing PRP injections over a few months. I wouldn't be surprised if the PRP and pentosan are synergistic so I'm glad I'll be doing them at the same time.