About 30 years ago, early in his career as a rheumatologist, Dirkjan van Schaardenburg, PhD, says patients with osteoarthritis experienced terrible problems with inflammation. The landscape has improved to the point that “people can live with it now,” he says. But they still need help. For example, osteoarthritis affects 7% of the global population, according to the Global Burden of Disease Collaborative Network, with 2.2% of the global years of healthy life lost to disability.1 Prof. van Schaardenburg, a researcher and professor of rheumatology with Reade Center for Rheumatology and Rehabilitation and Amsterdam University Medical Center, The Netherlands, thinks a research-based initiative he is co-leading will help.
Plants for Health is being developed around recent studies examining how introducing a plant-based diet, combined with other interventions, affects patients with osteoarthritis (OA) and those at a high risk of developing rheumatoid arthritis (RA). His team has published papers describing these Plants for Joints studies, with results showing participants manifested improvements in stiffness, pain and improved physical function—while also losing weight.
Prof. van Schaardenburg and his co-authors are optimistic their findings portend a potential treatment breakthrough for patients with OA.
“If you take people who are not used to this kind of diet and you make such changes, it’s huge for them,” says Prof. van Schaardenburg. “We have shown … that if you change your diet, you can actually reduce inflammation in general, but also specifically the inflammation in joints will go down.” This makes disease control possible with less medication.
Prof. van Schaardenburg
Another very important aspect, he says, is that “people feel better, so their general well-being is increased. They have more energy. … So it’s easier to cope with the disease.”
Patients with OA have long taken medications, engaged in exercise therapy and received joint replacement surgery as treatments. But their overall options are limited and not always impactful in the long term. “There isn’t too much we can do for osteoarthritis,” says Amanda Sammut, MD, chief of rheumatology at NYC Health + Hospitals/Harlem and a professor at Columbia University, New York. “We really need better treatments and better ways to manage osteoarthritis because despite our efforts, a lot of patients still are suffering.”
The Plants for Joints project includes randomized controlled trials comparing participants with hip or knee metabolic syndrome-associated osteoarthritis (MSOA) and RA receiving the intervention against control groups, and a two-year extension study measuring adherence for all study participants.
