My mother is wondering where glucosamine chondroitin comes from. She’s under the impression that it comes from cows, but she wants to know which/what kind of cows, and what the process is to get it. I’d heard it was made of shark cartilege, and did a web search–all I could find was lots of places selling glucosamine chondroitin with shark cartilege–nothing that told me what the stuff was or where it came from.
Specifically, my mom is concerned about things being transmitted in the stuff, like, for instance, mad cow disease. I told her I couldn’t find the answer, but there would certainly be someone here who’d be extremely informative.
TSEs are, of course, Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathies, or mad cow disease, among others.
So to address your mother’s concerns, there’s no way of knowing where the chondroitin in the bottle came from, unless it specifies “shark cartilage”. And as for the dangers of getting mad cow disease from it–hey, the FDA is On The Job. :rolleyes:
I dunno. An orthopod friend of mine cites studies that say it may work better than placebo, and basically tells his patients “Try it and let me know if it helps. It probably won’t hurt”. But I haven’t been interested enough to find out more than that. If it gets slow tonight in the old Urgent Care department I’ll consider looking. Right now I gotta rectal abscess to take care of. TTFN.
These two mini-reviews, from the superb evidence based medicine site called Bandolier, seem to suggest that both glucosamine and chrondroitin are effective. (Note that they are different substances).
Bandolier is a great example of the trend in contemporary medicine to use “evidence” as much as possible and not just resort to tradition and lore. In fact, until recently, a lot of the things done in medicine had very little evidence to back them up. One example is the operation to bypass blocked vessels in the brain, i.e. external to internal carotid bypass. At a time, this was one of the most popular operations of any sort. It became rather less popular, essentally abandoned, after the evidence showed it didn’t do any good.
So that Qadgop will have more time for his rectal abcess, I took a quick look for a pertinent, recent, well done study. I found Mazieres B, Combe B, Phan Van A, Tondut J, Grynfeltt M. Chondroitin sulfate in osteoarthritis of the knee: a prospective, double blind,placebo controlled multicenter clinical study. J Rheumatol 2001 Jan;28(1):173-181. It seems to be properly done and analyzed but had only 63 in treatment group and 67 in placebo group. The abstract can be found by searching at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/PubMed/
The conclusion is: “We observed a trend towards efficacy of CS 1 g/day compared to placebo with good tolerability after 3 month treatment, and persistent efficacy one month posttreatment. Further investigations are required to confirm this trend.” In other words, there seemed to be a small benefit, but this finding could have been due to chance. There was no large effect. Another study needs to be done to tell if the effect was real or not.
I had more luck looking for information on the effect of glucosamine on arthritis. I hit gold with a recent Cochrane Review: Towheed TE, Anastassiades TP, Shea B, Houpt J, Welch V, Hochberg MC. Glucosamine therapy for treating osteoarthritis (Cochrane Review). Cochrane Database Syst Rev 2001;1:CD002946. The authors systematically analyzed the results of properly done randomized controlled trials(RCTs) (this is what a Cochrane review is).
Their conclusions: “MAIN RESULTS: Collectively, the 16 identified RCTs provided evidence that glucosamine is both effective and safe in OA. In the 13 RCTs in which glucosamine was compared to placebo, glucosamine was found to be superior in all RCTs, except one. In the four RCTs in which glucosamine was compared to an NSAID, glucosamine was superior in two, and equivalent in two. REVIEWER’S CONCLUSIONS: Further research is necessary to confirm the long term effectiveness and toxicity of glucosamine therapy in OA. Most of the trials reviewed only evaluated the Rotta preparation of glucosamine sulfate. It is not known whether different glucosamine preparations prepared by different manufacturers are equally effective in the therapy of OA.”
Oops, please forgive my memory lapse, Dr. Mercotan. Time to up the ginkgo biloba dosage.
::d&r::
Yeah: that data looks promising. I just ordered and am giving to my elderly, arthritic pugs some doggy glucosamine, and I’ll keep an eye on the li’l guinea pigs and report if there seems to be any improvement. I guess we can count out the placebo effect on doggums?
Yes, thanks KarlGauss. The Bandolier home website was so good I bookmarked it.
The mention of “anecdotal evidence” on the glucosamine page reminds me of why I ordered the glucosamine for my dogs. The pug rescue association in Los Angeles often takes in elderly pugs from owners who have died or are too old to provide them proper care. As a result, they have a lot of arthritic dogs to look after. The rescue association’s website states that they’ve been giving glucosamine to their little senior citizens and in some cases the results were nearly miraculous.
I’m 45 myself and my mom is very afflicted with arthritis. Hmmmm. Maybe it’s time to start looking into this stuff . . .
My mom broke one ankle and sprained the other one about five years ago. She’s had persistent pain since then, and she believes the glucosamine helps. She’s kind of concerned, though, about taking a daily dose of the stuff for years, and also worried about mad cow, as I said. Anyway, the stuff seems to work for her.
Well, it has been one month since I started giving glucosamine to my old pugs. Here are the results:
One pug seems pretty much unaffected. The other one, who is older and much more arthritic, seems greatly improved. She is hopping in and out of her cuddle bed pretty easily, whereas before she was taking the glucosamine, she could barely struggle over the low bed lip. She is also trying to jump into my arms when I lean over to lift her onto the sofa with me, just like she did as a young pug. ::sniff:: She’s able to get up in the mornings and walk around right away; before, she was very stiff for several minutes and could barely hobble. I’ve been able to stop giving her her “dog”-uprofen every day.
Needless to say, I’m going to continue the glucosamine treatment and look into the possibility of taking it myself when I start getting stiff and arthritic.
