Treating Arthritis: Why the Truth Hurts (cont.)

The catch is that the herbal remedy must be extracted carefully from the thunder god vine’s skinned root, NCCAM says. Other plant parts, including the flowers, leaves and skin of the root, potentially are lethal. Also NIH’s thunder-god-vine/sulfasalazine study tracked just symptom relief and didn’t track other health dangers. Consequently, we believe that this remedy isn’t worth the risk, because the lack of governmental oversight means that there’s no way for you to know what’s in the pills that you buy.

Of course, as we noted, pharmaceutical remedies also carry risks, but you can find out what’s supposed to be in those formulas, which must gain FDA approval. And insurance plans are more likely to cover pharmaceuticals than they are herbal remedies. So, if a prescription medication turns out to be ineffective, you’ll be out less financially than if you buy a supply of an ineffective herbal remedy.

ON THE HORIZON. The hope of any treatment, of course, is to ease arthritis symptoms. Even Congress has tried to help, although its effort to pass legislation to boost arthritis research has stalled. The House of Representatives passed the Arthritis Prevention, Control and Cure Act of 2010 a year ago, and the Senate introduced it, but now it’s referred to committees in both chambers. The bill appropriates an estimated $52 million through 2015 to create a “national arthritis action plan” that would fund RA research grants and pay for training for juvenile-RA doctors.

Despite the bill’s derailment in Congress, a recent study suggests that, believe it or not, there might be a way to eliminate RA. In 2010, Dr. Harris Perlman of Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, found that people who have RA have immune cells that are low in a critical molecule. To correct the shortage, Perlman developed a synthetic molecule that floats into overactive immune cells and makes the troublesome cells self-destruct.

Perlman tested his fake molecule in animals that have RA, and the test was successful, he reported in the February 2010 issue of Arthritis & Rheumatism. The imitation molecule can both trigger a remission of RA when it was present and prevent the development of RA, he says.

Perlman’s work is continuing, and he’s hopeful of the outcome. “Not only can we prevent RA, but use [the imitation molecule] as a therapy,” he tells Consumers Digest. However, Perlman says much more work has to be done before his approach is ready to test in people, and he couldn’t predict how soon any treatment might become reality. Yazici, who studied Perlman’s research, says the science is promising, but it’s all speculation until it can be studied in humans.

Another line of research that’s emerging deals with how aging affects genes. Researchers hope to identify the genes that are key to the development of OA. The ultimate goal is to develop therapies that could turn off those genes.

A cure for arthritis? That’s something that we ache to see.

Kathleen Doheny has written about health topics for 30 years. Her reporting has appeared in Consumers Digest, the Los Angeles Times, Prevention and other publications.