The wellbeing of eight million people in the UK is affected by osteoarthritis, OA, making it the most common form of arthritis. It used to be considered a part of normal joint ageing, rather than a wellness concern, simply because it is so common, and put down to wear and tear, past injury and bearing excessive strain due to obesity. Though these are all important factors in the development of OA, another clue sheds some light on the matter: most of the sufferers are post-menopausal women.
With that said, oestrogen may be necessary for the health of joints, and could therefore be used to potentially prevent and repair OA. OA works by breaking down the cartilage lining of the bone ends in your joints, and narrowing the space between the bone ends. This progressive disease is what limits your freedom of movement. Your bone and cartilage are in connection with and sympathetic to each other and you can’t affect one without affecting the other.
Female sex hormones likely play a role in in the maintenance of joint health, both bone and cartilage, because OA predominantly affects women and that there’s a marked increase of OA in women after the menopause. Your synovium (the frictionless lining of joints), bone and cartilage contain oestrogen receptors which latch onto oestrogen and use it to keep the joints healthy, which is why several lab investigations have shown that oestrogen can hold back the destruction of the joints and significantly lessen joint inflammation.
So could oestrogen replacement therapy, ET, or HRT help prevent OA occurring, or slow down its progress? The benefits that these lab experiments have shown have been confirmed in patients using biochemical markers. Patients have demonstrated a 50% reduction in cartilage destruction and synovial inflammation, and, recently, these results have been validated in the Women’s Health Initiative (161,808 women), which showed that when you, as a woman, take oestrogen, you will eventually need significantly fewer joint replacements. It is thought that this occurs because oestrogen both prevents bone breakdown and stimulates new bone production, and it also damps down inflammation in the synovium, which is a prominent feature of late-stage OA.
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