Sunday Mirror (Northern Ireland)
The Olympic medallist tells Amy Packer
How a revolutionary treatment has left him pain free for the first time in decades
Colin Jackson is in high spirits. After years of searing agony from his knees, he finally has a spring in his step again. “I’m pain free in the mornings,” he exclaims.
“I get out of bed and just think, ‘Oh my God, why didn’t I do this years ago?’”
Since March, the former world champion hurdler and 1988 Olympic silver medallist has been having his own blood plasma injected back into his knees every six weeks in preparation for a stem cell transplant later this year.
He already feels like a younger man.
“It has made a huge, huge difference,” Colin, 54, says.
“The blood plasma injections are the most important part of the whole treatment because it kickstarts the healing process.
“I live in quite a hilly place just outside Cardiff and what a difference it has made to walking up and down those hills. It reminds me of what life was like 20 or 30 years ago when I didn’t have these issues. It’s amazing.”
Colin’s athletics career left him with an impressive medals cabinet but severe damage to his kneecaps, cartilage, ligaments and tendons, which seven operations have failed to remedy.
He was struggling getting in and out of the bath, his knees would seize up on long car journeys and every morning was filled with pain.
Now, slowly but surely, Colin is seeing the benefits of the plasma transfusions, which he has been having at a clinic on London’s Harley Street.
“It’s been a steady build,” he says. “I feel like [the cartilage] is growing back. My knees are really stable, which has allowed me to train my quad muscles more.
“Then your knees feel better because they’re better supported, which allows everything to improve.” The treatment is not without discomfort though.
“They take my blood, remove all the red blood cells and inject the plasma back into my knees,” he explains.
“I’ve had all four sessions I needed to prepare my knees for the stem cell transplant and they build up the concentration each time.”
Rather than painful, Colin described the process as “awkward, because of course you get a lot of liquid injected in your knees that wasn’t there before and your knees are already quite full of liquid! It takes about five days for the inflammation to go down.
“You have to take it easy for the first 48 hours and you can’t take any anti-inflammatory painkillers as that would make the treatment less effective, so you just have to muscle through the pain. Then things kick in and I do feel a lot better.”
Now Colin is waiting for the final stage of treatment – the stem cell transplant itself.
“I have to be out of action for about 10 days and at the moment I can’t do that because of my work schedule, but the majority of the preparation has been done, so it will happen very soon,” he says.
It’s by no means a simple process. “They go in with a drill and take bone marrow from my femur to harvest the stem cells,” he says.