New Procedure Brings Hope to Osteoarthritis Patients

Medicine is changing and evolving all the time. Now, advances in medicine could bring relief for people who suffer from arthritis in their knees. 

A new study in the December 2024 issue of the Journal of Vascular and Interventional Radiology shows that this type of treatment, Genicular Artery Embolization (GAE), is quite effective for reducing pain in people with osteoarthritis in their knees. 

The Most Common Cause

According to a Radiological Society of North America press release, osteoarthritis, which is a progressive and degenerative condition, is the leading cause of chronic joint disorders. More than 365 million adults suffer from osteoarthritis in their knees worldwide. 

For a long time, osteoarthritis was considered a disease that occurred due to regular wear and tear of the joints. However, it is now thought that actually the disease causes the growth of abnormal blood vessels, causing inflammation and pain.

Most current treatments of osteoarthritis just help mask the symptoms of the disease. They don’t stop its progression. Eventually patients are forced to consider joint replacement surgery, which is invasive and painful. 

Minimally Invasive
The study, according to MedicalXpress, followed 40 patients with moderate to severe osteoarthritis and tracked their pain scores for 24 months after receiving GAE. The results were encouraging. Of the 40 patients, 25 reported improvement after one year, and 18 of those 25 reported continued relief after two years. This means that 47 percent of the original patients (two of the original 40 dropped out) had a more than 50 percent reduction in their osteoarthritis symptoms over two years. 

“For patients who are not candidates for knee replacement surgery, our study shows that GAE provides durable benefits to many patients, measurable for up to two years, a great leap forward in offering this cohort lasting relief,” Dr. Siddharth A. Padia, a lead author of the study and a professor of radiology at UCLA Health, told MedicalXpress. 

With GAE, an interventional radiologist inserts a small catheter into the arteries of the arthritic knee and injects miniscule particles to normalize the blood flow to the inflamed areas. This minimally invasive outpatient procedure can take from one to two hours, with a two hour recovery time. 

For a lot of people, osteoarthritis is something that they just have to live with. Treatment could mask the pain, but save a total joint replacement, nothing could be done. Now, with GAE on the table, all that has changed. In just one to two hours the lives of so many people can be utterly transformed for the better.