Osteoarthritis Research Today is a free monthly online journal that collates and summarizes the latest research about Osteoarthritis, including details on treatment, symptoms, causes, medication.

Osteoarthritis - an untreatable disease?

Wieland HA, Michaelis M, Kirschbaum BJ, Rudolphi KA

Therapeutic Department Thrombosis & Osteoarthritis, Aventis Pharma Deutschland GmbH, a company of the Sanofi-Aventis group, Industrial Park Höchst, 65926 Frankfurt, Germany. Heike.Wieland@sanofi-aventis.com

Osteoarthritis is a painful and disabling disease that affects millions of patients. Its aetiology is largely unknown, but is most likely multi-factorial. Osteoarthritis poses a dilemma: it often begins attacking different joint tissues long before middle age, but cannot be diagnosed until it becomes symptomatic decades later, at which point structural alterations are already quite advanced. In this review, osteoarthritis is considered as a disease of the whole joint that may result from multiple pathophysiological mechanisms, one of which is the dysregulation of lipid homeostasis. No proven disease-modifying therapy exists for osteoarthritis and current treatment options for chronic osteoarthritic pain are insufficient, but new pharmacotherapeutic options are emerging.

Published 1 April 2005 in Nat Rev Drug Discov, 4(4): 331-44.
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