Steroid injections for osteoarthritis - harmful or helpful?

Osteoarthritis pain remains a large unmet clinical need. One common tool in the clinician’s armamentarium has been a steroid injection. They are widely used but recent evidence has questioned their efficacy for pain relief and potentially associated ongoing structural changes, including accelerating the underlying structural progression.

On this episode of Joint Action, we will hear from Ali Guermazi and Margreet Kloppenburg about the harms and benefits of steroid injections for osteoarthritis.

Dr. Margreet Kloppenburg, MD PhD, is Professor of Rheumatology in the Department of Rheumatology at the Leiden University Medical Center. She is a rheumatologist and epidemiologist. Since 2000 she is appointed both at the departments of Rheumatology and of Clinical Epidemiology of the LUMC. Her research interest includes osteoarthritis with focus on two topics, 1) unravelling underlying pathways in development and progression of osteoarthritis, aimed at inflammatory, metabolic and genetic mechanisms, and 2) optimization of methodology to measure osteoarthritis symptoms and signs, to enable development of disease modifying drugs. She is PI of several cohorts and randomized clinical trials in patients with osteoarthritis. She uses imaging modalities, as radiography, ultrasonography and MR imaging and basic science tools, including immunohistochemistry and metabolomics to characterize and study osteoarthritis patients. She has special interest for hand osteoarthritis.

Dr. Guermazi is a French board-certified radiologist. Dr. Guermazi’s interest is musculoskeletal diseases, in particular note are his scientific contributions in the diagnosis and disease progression assessment of osteoarthritis using MRI. His work has focused on identifying structural risk factors for developing and worsening osteoarthritis. He has been involved in developing several original and widely accepted radiological methods to assess osteoarthritis disease risk and progression, including the WORMS, BLOKS and MOAKS for the knee, HOAMS for the hip and fixed-flexion radiography for measuring joint space width. Dr. Guermazi has been involved as an MRI reader for the past 14 years in several large U.S. studies. He is author of over 275 peer-reviewed publications and Investigator on numerous research grants related to MRI reading for Osteoarthritis

RESOURCES

Videos

• OA summit debate series on steroid injections - video recording
• More Research Needed to Determine Safety of Hip and Knee Steroid Injections

Journal articles

• Intra-articular Corticosteroid Injections in the Hip and Knee: Perhaps Not as Safe as We Thought?
• Effects of Intensive Diet and Exercise on Knee Joint Loads, Inflammation, and Clinical Outcomes Among Overweight and Obese Adults With Knee OsteoarthritisThe IDEA Randomized Clinical Trial

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