Cartilage repair has an unwritten age limit. Around 55, most surgeons stop offering regenerative options and start talking about managing symptoms instead. The assumption is that older cartilage cells will not do the job.
A case report in the Journal of ISAKOS describes what happened when a team in Spain declined to apply that rule. Their patient was a 60 year old elite professional Spanish dancer with a symptomatic chondral lesion measuring 1.8 by 1 centimeter on the medial femoral condyle, the weight bearing surface on the inner side of the knee. Three years after surgery, he was back performing professionally with no pain and no functional impairment. His International Knee Documentation Committee score, a patient-reported measure of knee symptoms and function, rose from 18 before the operation to 94 at final follow-up.
