Glucosamine’s a Flop for Knee Pain

photo credit: cosmo flash

Remember the Great Echinacea Craze of the late ’90s? Freezing temps rolled in and everyone was popping Echinacea to prevent the sniffles. Fervent believers in the Chinese herb faced cold and flu season with a sense of calm: “I’m not going to get sick, I’m taking Echinacea. It cures runny noses and stops the flu in its tracks! It even tackles world peace!”

And then? Some studies came out saying, “Hold on there just one minute! Echinacea doesn’t really work. Suckers.” People went back to fortifying themselves with diligent hand washing and into-the-arm sneezes as the popular pill slowly faded out of the spotlight. (There are still ardent followers who are probably wagging their fingers at me right now.)

Anyhow, that’s the first thing I thought of when I heard about the latest research on glucosamine. A recent study says it doesn’t work. Bummer.

Here’s the deal on the supplement: Runners, cyclists, and anyone else who wants to prevent debilitating knee pain and a future diagnosis of osteoarthritis have been popping the pill to keep knees cushy. I take a vitamin with a mix of glucosamine and its knee-loving brother chondroitin sulfate, on a daily basis with hope that it will minimize my cartilage damage—or reverse it.

But researchers at the American College of Rheumatology’s annual scientific meeting, going on this week in Philly, have burst that bubble. They presented findings from a recent study that say the supplement was no better than a placebo at preventing knee joint damage in a group of middle-aged men and women. The researchers randomly split 201 participants into two groups: One received glucosamine while the other got a placebo. At the end of the six-month study, the researchers scanned all of the participants’ knees with an MRI, then compared the final images with the “before” pictures. Disappointingly, there was no difference in joint damage between the two groups.

I know, I know … Study the participants for longer than six months, you say. Sounds like a super idea to me, but Eric Matteson, MD, a professor of medicine and chair of the Department of Rheumatolgoy at the Mayo Clinic says a longer-term study probably won’t find a benefit, either. “The likelihood that a difference could be found if we continued these studies for a longer time is very small,” says Matteson, who wasn’t involved with the study. “And if such a benefit were to be found it is likely that it would be so small as to have little clinical impact.”

Well, way to rain on our parade of hopefulness. Because I’m desperate to give up my knee pain, I think I’ll stick with my glucosamine and chondroitin pill for now. Who knows, maybe glucosamine works in conjunction with chondroitin. Maybe it takes a year to kick in. Maybe it only works if you click your heels together three times and say, “I want to run again. I want to run again. I want to run again.”

I’d also like to point out that science has been wrong before. Remember when stick margarine was the smartest thing to happen to your refrigerator since lettuce? Yeah, well, we all know how that went. (Ahem, trans fats.)

So tell me, which vitamins and supplements do you take? Anyone out there had success with glucosamine and chondroitin?