With a new study having found that the osteoporosis drug ‘teriparatide’ can apparently thicken damaged knee joints, it is being hoped that the drug could hold off arthritis – a condition that causes inflammation of the bones and joints!

Since there is no cure at present for arthritis, and the existing treatments merely ease the excruciating pain that the condition causes, the findings of the study – carried out by the researchers at the University of Rochester Medical Centre, New York State – underscore the potential that teriparatide could be used for treating osteoarthritis, the most common type of arthritis.

Teriparatide is essentially a brittle bone drug; and is marketed under the brand names Forteo and Forsteo in the US and Europe respectively.

With trials of the drug in mice having revealed that a month-long treatment with teriparatide brought about a 32 percent more thickness of cartilage in the mice’s knee joints, researchers are hopeful that the results of the trial would transfer over to humans as well.

In the opinion of the researchers, further studies, including proper trials of people suffering from arthritis, will seemingly lead to the approval of teriparatide as a treatment for arthritis as well as osteoporosis.

Commending the findings and the potential of the study, Arthritis Research UK’s Professor Phil Conaghan said that “anything” that helps to treat arthritis was welcome --- more so given the fact that the “debilitating condition” affects over six million people in the UK!