Osteoarthritis May Be Prevented If Diagnosed At Early Stage
There is new method which may help doctors identify osteoarthritis at such an early stage, the Science Daily says, quoting study findings. This development may help lessen the increase of hip implant surgeries about "which court documents reveal to be more than 900 cases in DePuy Pinnacle MDL".
With this latest discovery, it may be possible to delay the development of osteoarthritis by many years, or maybe even stop it entirely, reports the Science Daily.
There are more than 21 million Americans who have osteoarthritis. As baby boomers age, their number is expected to increase. Osteoarthritis is among the most common causes of disability in adults around the world, the About.com website says.
Carl Siversson, who has just defended his thesis in medical radiation physics at Lund University in Sweden, says that osteoarthritis often attack the knee and hip joints and breaks down the impact-absorbing cartilage found there. For those affected, the development of the ailment usually takes many years, with increasing pain which often leads to disability, Science Daily reports.
One of the reasons why there is an increase in the number of patients developing osteoarthritis is the problem of diagnosing and monitoring the disease before it turns palpable or serious. It has therefore been hard to treat. There has been difficulty in delaying the progression of the disease, as was mentioned in the Science Daily website.
However, a couple years ago, researchers from Lund University and Harvard Medical School developed a technique to compute the degree of osteoarthritis using an MRI scanner, even at a very early stage. The method is called Delayed Gadolinium-enhanced MRI of cartilage (dGEMRIC).
Siversson says that this was major progress, but one problem was that the measurements could only be performed in a limited part of the cartilage. "We have now improved the method so that we can study all the cartilage in the joint at once. We have achieved this by solving the problem of how to correct all the irregularities in the MRI images," he discloses.
He adds that the improved method has now been tested both on healthy individuals and individuals with osteoarthritis, and the results show that the disease can now be monitored in ways that were not previously possible, the Science Daily reports.
Siversson, after completing his PhD, will continue his research at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts. He says that his team are continuing their work to make the method easy for doctors to use in their practice. Their hope is that the method will also be significant for future drug development and will make a great impact in the lowering of number of osteoarthritis-stricken patients who usually undergo hip implants which may lead to filing Pinnacle lawsuit.
URL REFERENCES:
osteoarthritis.about.com/od/jointprotection/a/OA_prevention.htm
www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/09/110912102118.htm
