Introduction

The natural history of osteonecrosis of the femoral head (ONFH) is not cleanly understood, but most of them progresse to the joint destruction and requires total hip replacement arthroplasty. There are several head preserving procedure, but no single therapeutic method proved to be effective in preventing progression of the disease. The possibility has been raised that implantation of bone marrow containing osteogenic precursors may be effective in the treatment of this disease. However, there are no long-term follow-up results of cell therapy for ONFH. AS far as we know, there are no reports about bone graft and cell therapy for ONFH. Therefore, we performed a prospective clinical and radiological evaluation on ONFH treated with core decompression combined with autoiliac bone graft and an implantation of autologous bone marrow cells as a therapeutic method of ONFH.