Among all major chronic pain related disease, osteoarthritis is one of the popular ones which have had affected over 30 million individuals in the whole of the United States. Many of the sufferers regularly consume steroid injection as a way to get rid of the pain. But a new study hint that this technique is not at all helpful in such cases, even the harmful at some measures patients with symptomatic knee osteoarthritis. The study was recently published in JAMA.
According to Medical News Today, Timothy E. McAlindon, the co-author of the study, who belongs from Tufts Medical Center in Boston, MA, came up with these findings that the treatment with corticosteroid injections actually harm the bone cartilage, the tissue which supports the bones at their joining points. Osteoarthritis (OA) is considered to be one of the most common forms arthritis.
The symptoms of OA mainly arise due to the damage of those bone cartilage. There are no proper remedies of OA but corticosteroid injection was thought to be a potential prevention for this sufferings. But McAlindon along with his team researchers now claim that placebo based treatment is better than that of corticosteroid injection in terms of OA.
Medscape pointed that the team took 140 OA patients for the observation. Among them, 70 patients were treated with corticosteroid injections for 2 years on an interval of every 12 weeks. The other 70 were treated with placebo for the similar timeline. The result was shocking as steroid injected patients reported an average loss of bone cartilage thickness by 0.21 millimetres whereas those of placebo-treated ones surfaced only 0.10 millimetres loss.
Besides the pain reduction reported by the patients with both the treatment techniques demonstrated a very nominal difference. The finding is now considered to be one of the biggest outbreaks in terms of knee pain based Osteoarthritis.
