PAIN RELIEVER TOO STRONG!

“This is more potent than any pain medication I have ever had in arthritis,” said Lane, director of the Center for Aging at the University of California at Davis School of Medicine in Sacramento, in a telephone interview. “Because this is a new chapter in controlling pain, we didn’t realize we needed to counsel our patients in using their joints that were still diseased. Now we need to figure out how to use it so the risks don’t outweigh the benefits.”

An experimental arthritis drug from Pfizer Inc. reduced pain more than researchers anticipated, doctors said. It also allowed previously hobbled patients to overuse and permanently damage their joints.

Bone destruction developed in 16 of 6,800 patients taking the medicine, tanezumab, as part of Pfizer’s development program, and they all needed a complete joint replacement for the affected knee, hip or shoulder, according to a report in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Pain-free patients may have put excessive pressure on their fragile joints because they weren’t getting natural pain signals to take it easy, said the lead researcher, Nancy Lane. Patients in the study received an injection of tanezumab or placebo on the first day and during the eighth week of treatment.

Almost half of the patients were already candidates for joint replacement because of damage. Reduction in knee pain ranged from 45 percent to 62 percent in those given the Pfizer drug, depending on the dose, compared with 22 percent for those given placebo.

SIDE EFFECTS: MINIMAL

“I’ve never worked with anything that’s been this good for pain,” Lane said. “I’m not saying it’s perfect, but it is a game changer, provided we learn how to use it.”

“Pain has an important role in the avoidance of self-harm, but chronic inflammatory pain has generally been considered to be wholly undesirable,” said John Wood, professor of neurobiology at University College London, in an editorial that accompanied the research.

“The study by Lane et al. suggests that a complete quenching of pain in patients with osteoarthritis may not necessarily be a good thing.”

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Tags: BACK PAINB, featured, JOINTS, osteoarthritis, PAIN RELIEVER