For those of you that suffer from it and for those of you who know people who do, you’ll know what I mean when I say that arthritis can be crippling. It’s not just that it’ll restrict and then eliminate your mobility; it’s the pain and the emotional strain of slowly losing the ease of motion which you’ll have been used to when you were younger. It’d a tricky thing to manage and as with all degenerative disorders, the slow-burn damage it’ll do to you can be far more damaging than anything which displayed more immediate effects.
The inflammation of the joints, which is the main symptom of arthritis, can be caused in a small variety of different ways and as such, the condition can be treated in different ways too. Most of these treatments revolve around dealing with the pain and helping to maintain mobility, a few aim at protecting the joints themselves from further damage. Early treatment and early targeting of the factors which are likely to continue to progressively harm the patient is the best way to treat most illnesses however and as such a new treatment for arthritis is being developed.
By adding a B-cell depleting agent called rituximab to the existing treatment, methotrexate, researchers hoped to pioneer a treatment which both worked at protecting patients’ joints from further damage and help to numb the pain. By targeting the root cause of the pain in the first place the treatment is more likely to prevent escalation and the more chronic aspects of arthritis while keeping a patient as mobile as is possible.
This treatment has shown great promise during clinical trials and is on its way to being released. It could be a long while before it’s seen as common practise however and as such, you should contact your doctor with any concerns you may have. All knowledge is good knowledge, after all.
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