TV adventurer Steve Backshall has revealed his battle with osteoarthritis – and how a treatment available in Oxford helped cure the crippling pain.

Steve, 48, had a major climbing accident 13 years ago, falling about 30ft onto rock, which broke his back in two places and shattered his left ankle.

He said: “I had 11 operations to sort it, but as I continued doing expeditions all of the pressure was going through my right knee, and eventually it started to fail.

“I was in constant chronic pain, which we eventually identified as osteoarthritis – it was a bit of a shock and not something I wanted to admit to myself. I have a life where I need to be making the first ascents of mountains in the middle of nowhere and I need to have a functioning body.”

Steve – who is married to Olympic gold medal rower Helen Glover – tried to manage through sheer determination, even during some demanding expeditions.

“I was just gritting my teeth, getting through it. As expedition leader, you’re the one who has to be driving things forward in a positive way. The last thing you want is to be focusing too much on yourself, and chronic pain makes you do that.”

But it was when he became a father that he really saw the need to admit and address his condition.

He and Helen, 35, have three-year-old son Logan and 19-month-old twins Kit and Willow.

The treatment Steve had, called nStride, uses extracts from the patient’s own blood which, after being concentrated in a centrifuge, were injected back into his knee.

It is available at The Manor Hospital in Oxford – one of only 20 clinics in the country.

Jennifer Woodell-May, Research Associate and Director of Biologics at Zimmer Biomet, the company which developed nStride, said: “The latest published clinical results suggest a single nStride injection can last up to three years in some patients. More recently collected data has shown some patients even have pain relief for up to five years."

Within a week, Steve said he started to notice a reduction in pain.

He said: “Having three young kids can be surprisingly physical, whether it's picking the youngsters up out of the cots or playing football in the garden. Being able to get over that is huge because these are moments that I’ll never get back. And wouldn't it be awful if I look back in 10 or 15 years’ time and I never ran around playing rugby because I had this ache in my knee and it could have been solved."

Some experts say the best way to manage early osteoarthritis is to have strong thigh muscles to support the load on the knee joint.

Professor Richie Gill, Chair of Healthcare Engineering and Deputy Director of the Centre for Therapeutic Innovation at the University of Bath, said: “There is no better pharmaceutical than activity but if pain reduces your activity, that then can lead to a whole array of problems such as weight gain, diabetes, cardiac diseases, depression, cancer and dementia – all leading causes of death."