Credit: Unsplash+ If you or someone you know has ever experienced persistent hand pain, you know how much it can affect daily life. Simple tasks, like buttoning a shirt or opening a jar, can become difficult, frustrating, and painful.
This kind of discomfort might be more than just a minor annoyance—it could be due to a condition called hand osteoarthritis (OA).
Recent research from Monash University and Alfred Health offers hope in the form of a commonly used drug that could help manage the pain of hand OA.
What is Hand Osteoarthritis?
Osteoarthritis is a condition that affects the joints, the places where bones meet and allow movement. In hand OA, the small joints in the hands are affected, causing pain, stiffness, and difficulty with everyday tasks.
It’s a condition that becomes more common with age, and by the time people reach 85, about half of all women and a quarter of all men will have experienced hand OA.
What makes this condition especially challenging is that, until recently, there weren’t many effective treatments specifically for hand OA pain.
But this new research is exciting because it suggests that there may finally be a way to manage the pain associated with this condition.
Methotrexate: An Old Drug with New Potential The drug methotrexate has been around since the 1980s, commonly used to treat conditions like rheumatoid arthritis, which causes inflammation and pain in the joints.However, a team led by Professor Flavia Cicuttini at Monash University wanted to see if methotrexate could also be effective for people with hand OA.In their study, participants took 20 mg of methotrexate once a week for six months. The results were promising: those taking methotrexate reported significantly less pain and stiffness in their hands compared to a group that took a placebo.In fact, the group on methotrexate experienced double the improvement in pain levels compared to the placebo group. And what’s even more exciting is that the pain relief continued to improve over the entire six-month period. Looking Ahead: The Future of Hand OA Treatment While these findings offer hope, Professor Cicuttini and her team are eager to continue […]
This drug shows promise in treating hand pain caused by osteoarthritis
