Arthritis

Johnson & Johnson won U.S. approval of a rheumatoid arthritis drug designed to be injected less often than its top-selling product, Remicade. The Food and Drug Administration on Friday announced its decision on the medicine, golimumab. The drug, to be co-marketed outside the U.S. by Schering-Plough Corp., will compete with Amgen Inc.'s Enbrel and Abbott Laboratories' Humira. Remicade produced more than $5 billion in revenue last year, according to the data research firm IMS Health Inc.

I read that Pycnogenol may be helpful for hot flashes. Now a major warehouse club is selling it as a powerful antioxidant with supposed benefits for cardiovascular health, osteoarthritis, skin care, asthma and allergy relief and diabetes. Has any of it been proven? To our surprise, there are studies suggesting that Pycnogenol, extracted from French maritime pine bark, is better than a placebo in making blood vessels more flexible (Hypertension Research, September 2007), improving blood-sugar control and reducing cardiovascular risk factors (Nutrition Research, May 2008)

A gene therapy treatment for arthritis, developed at the University of Pittsburgh and being tested on humans for the first time, is the first aimed at treating a nonfatal illness, said Christopher Evans, one of the study's principal investigators. Doctors now treat arthritis with drugs, surgery and artificial joints, but no cure exists. Dr. James Herndon, an orthopedic surgeon, said the therapy could lead to a cure. Evans said he hopes the therapy will be generally available within five years.

Medical books indicate that at least since the time of Hippocrates, around 400 BC, doctors and their patients have believed that arthritis pain is influenced by the weather. So certain has the relationship been that many doctors today encourage severely affected patients to move to milder climates. Yet scientific proof of a link between weather and arthritis pain has remained elusive.

A large medical study has exonerated silicone breast implants as a cause of connective tissue diseases such as lupus and arthritis. Harvard researchers, reporting today in the New England Journal of Medicine, compared hundreds of nurses who had silicone gel-filled breast implants with nurses who did not and found that the rates of tissue diseases were virtually the same in both groups.

Adding the immunosuppressive drug cyclosporine to a regimen of the anti-arthritic drug methotrexate can significantly reduce the symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis, according to a study in the New England Journal of Medicine. A team at the University of Ottawa gave 74 arthritics methotrexate alone and 74 a combination of the two drugs.

At first glance, Amye Leong seems to have little in common with the semicircle of 21 senior citizens surrounding her at the Felicia Mahood Senior Center in West Los Angeles. Then the 37-year-old tells her story: Diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis at age 18, she began using a wheelchair at 25 when her joints became so inflamed that movement--even feeding herself--became nearly impossible. As a last resort, she turned to surgery to replace her diseased, painful joints.

For people living with chronic pain, exercise is often the last thing they want to do. But physical activity could be a key component of some treatment plans, new studies suggest, especially with conditions such as fibromyalgia and arthritis. "The pain doesn't go away completely. It's not a cure. But it's a way to improve how you feel and your ability to function in daily life," says Daniel S.

HERE'S something to kick around. People who do about 6 to 9 miles a week of recreational walking don't appear to be at greater risk for osteoarthritis of the knee than their more sedentary peers, according to a study appearing in the February issue of Arthritis Care & Research. On the flip side, recreational walking doesn't appear to confer meaningful protection from osteoarthritis either, as some smaller studies have suggested.

Americans with osteoarthritis of the knee may need to wait a little longer for proof that three common approaches actually work. In a review of 42 randomized controlled trials on hyaluronic acid injections, 21 studies on the supplements glucosamine and chondroitin and 23 articles on arthroscopy, researchers at the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Assn.