Still, No “Magic Pill” for Hip Osteoarthritis

Most patients with hip osteoarthritis dream of a nutritional supplement that will improve their clinical symptoms. Findings from a new study of a soybean-avocado supplement suggest they’ll have to keep dreaming. However, relative to placebo takers, those taking 300 mg a day of a proprietary soybean-avocado supplement over three years were 20% less likely to experience a loss of joint-space width of 0.5 mm or more. Alas, there were no significant differences between the two groups in important patient-centered outcomes such as pain and the use of analgesics or NSAIDs. The industry-funded study of nearly 400 patients initially set out to determine changes in joint-space narrowing (JSN) between the two groups, but researchers amended the protocol to measure progression because JSN was found not to be a “quantitative linear normally distributed parameter.”