A new study revealed that metformin, which is usually prescribed to treat type 2 diabetes, can reduce pain in people with knee arthritis and suffer from weight gain, which may delay the need to replace knee.
The study was conducted by researchers from the Australian University of Monash, and published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) on April 24, and was written by the Yurrick Alert website.
The experiment compared the effect of metformin and the effect of the placebo in relieving knee pain in patients with knee joint inflammation accompanied by weight or obesity.
73 women and 34 men who were suffering from knee joint pain were participated in the study, and some of them took metformists daily for 6 months, while others took a fake drug. None of them suffered from diabetes.
Knee pain was measured on a scale from 0 to 100, as it represents 100 most pain. The metformin group reported a decrease in pain by 31.3 points after 6 months of treatment, compared to 18.9 points for the imaginary drug group. This has been considered an average effect on pain.
The researchers found that these results support metformin to treat arthritis accompanied by knee symptoms in people with weight gain or obesity.
The main researcher, Professor Flavia Sikotini, who heads the structural musculoskeletal unit at the University of Monash and the head of the Rheumatic Diseases Department at Alfred Hospital, said that the results showed that metformin is a new and affordable way to improve knee pain in people with knee arthritis and weight gain or obesity.