Some of the most common traits among patients with cartilage issues in the knee are excluding them from participating in clinical trials because the trial outcomes might not yield the optimum results for new methods of cartilage regeneration, according to a Penn Medicine study published in Regenerative Medicine. Researchers testing the new methods tend to only include the patients most likely to succeed with the fewest complications, but if some of these trials could be safely opened up to different kinds of patients — such as those older than 55 or younger than 18, or those who knee joints don’t align perfectly — the results could be much more robust and reflective of the patient population being treated. In the team’s paper, they also highlighted therapies that hold special promise for the excluded populations, such as the use of “scaffolding” to promote cartilage growth… Continue reading.