Recent major guidelines to osteoarthritis treatment have ceased to recommend the use of chondroprotective drugs; this new standing is based on new data, but comes mostly from a reassessment of existing information through methods of evidence-based medicine; these were more rigorous, with significant changes in the search and inclusion criteria, minimum follow-up requirement and the use of the concept of minimum clinically important improvement. However, currently available data includes a wealth of high quality studies demonstrating long term symptomatic relief and additional benefits such as global efficacy that match results described for non steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs. It is an undisputed concept that osteoarthritis should be managed as an integrated package of care rather than through single treatments, ministered alone or in succession. Thus, when osteoarthritis is in fact managed through any single treatment in order to conduct a controlled trial, it logically follows that it would be difficult to produce significant symptomatic improvements. Moreover, it is well established that positive placebo effects are a significant entity in osteoarthritis research. Therefore, it seems unreasonable to disqualify statistically significant results favoring chondroprotective agents used as monotherapy vs. a powerful placebo and consider them to be "not clinically relevant".
We performed a review of the literature and found high quality data showing that chondroprotective agents are safe, effective and decrease the use of non-steroidal anti-inflammatory agents. We therefore suggest that recent guidelines are overly dogmatic.
KEYWORDS:
Osteoarthritis; chondroprotective drugs; treatment