Arthritis: Did the reporting of a study looking at arthritis remedies get it wrong?

You've got to accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative, goes the old Johnny Mercer song.

Maybe someone should call up the editors of MSNBC and let them know their coverage of a recent major study (known as GAIT: Glucosamine/chondroitin Arthritis Intervention Trial) exactly reverses Mercer's good advice.

More to the point, the strongly dismissive tone of the MSNBC article (much like the rest of the mainstream coverage of this trial) leads readers to assume that dietary supplements are ineffective, when the trial actually revealed just the opposite.

Study compares glucosamine, chondroitin to mainstream drug
The usefulness of glucosamine and chondroitin sulfate has been covered many times before. These essential components of cartilage are naturally produced by the body, and in supplement form have been shown to slow and even reverse the degenerative effects of osteoarthritis.

According to MSNBC, these two 'top-sellers for the aches and pains of osteoarthritis hardly made a difference.' And that's true...if you remove the word 'hardly.'

MSNBC tells us that the GAIT study was '30,000 strong.' That figure is only off by about 28,000 (a good clue as to just how off the article truly is). In fact, the research team recruited 1,583 osteoarthritis patients and randomly assigned each to receive one of the following treatments daily for 24 weeks:
* 1,500 mg of glucosamine
* 1,200 mg of chondroitin sulfate
* glucosamine and chondroitin combined in the amounts above
* 200 mg of celecoxib
* placebo
Does celecoxib ring a bell? That's the generic name for Celebrex, the COX-2 inhibitor that was linked to increased heart attack risk in a 2000 study that appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association. As with other drugs in this class, Celebrex use also raises the risk of liver and kidney damage. None of these illuminating details are mentioned in the MSNBC article.

Red herring?
In the abstract for this study (which appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine), the conclusion states that glucosamine and chondroitin alone or in combination did not reduce pain effectively in the overall group, but in the subgroup of patients with moderate-to-severe knee pain, the combination of the two supplements 'may be effective.'

And here's how MSNBC put it: 'Patients with mild joint pain saw no improvement by using glucosamine and chondroitin, though there was some relief for people with more severe pain.'

Both of these assessments gloss over important details. For instance, in the overall group (Mild/Moderate and Moderate/Severe symptoms), the positive response rate of the two supplements combined was only 6.5 percent greater than the positive response to placebo. But the positive response to placebo was a whopping 60.1 percent!

You've got to wonder: What the heck was in those placebo pills that convinced several hundred placebo subjects for six months that they were experiencing less pain?

The real deal
To dig down and really find out what's happening in this study we need to check in with someone who's qualified to sort out the details - someone like joint health expert Jason Theodosakis, M.D. On his web site, Dr. Theodosakis points out that in subjects with Moderate/Severe pain, Celebrex performed less effectively than the supplements in 12 out of 14 outcome measures. And he adds: 'Overall, glucosamine and/or chondroitin was better than placebo 50% of the time.'

Meanwhile, Celebrex was 'no better than placebo in 12 out of 14 measures for the All Subjects; no better than placebo in 12 out of 14 measures for the Moderate/Severe Pain group; and in the subjects who started the study with mild/moderate pain from osteoarthritis, Celebrex failed in 14/14 outcomes!'

So who is serving consumers better? The MSNBC article, or the analysis from Dr. Theodosakis, who happens to be an oversight committee member of the US National Institute of Health Glucosamine/chondroitin Arthritis Intervention Trial?

Obviously, it's no contest. The shame is that MSNBC articles are seen by hundreds of thousands of consumers who are now completely misinformed on this study.

You can read all of Dr. Theodosakis' comments about GAIT at www.drtheo.com