Newly published research finds that individuals who lost substantial weight with semaglutide experienced significant improvements in knee pain from osteoarthritis.
The finding, published in The New England Journal of Medicine on October 30, showed that people with osteoarthritis who exercised, dieted, and took semaglutide lost weight and reported more significant reductions in knee pain than those who only used diet and exercise to shed pounds.
“Among participants with obesity and knee osteoarthritis with moderate-to-severe pain, treatment with once-weekly injectable semaglutide resulted in significantly greater reductions in body weight and pain related to knee osteoarthritis than placebo,” the study concluded.
Semaglutide, part of a class of drugs known as GLP-1s, is the active ingredient in the popular drugs Ozempic and Wegovy. It has been shown to have numerous possible medical benefits outside of helping treat type 2 diabetes and obesity, including a potential ability to reduce Alzheimer’s risk, as recently detailed in The Dallas Express.
Now, the drug shows further promise in helping individuals with severe knee pain.
To conduct the study, researchers gave patients, all of whom were overweight, a weekly injection of semaglutide or a placebo for 68 weeks. Participants were also coached on calorie-reduction plans and exercise routines.
At the end of the trial, those who received semaglutide shots lost an average of roughly 14% of their body weight, compared to just 3% in the placebo group. The former group also reported a 42-point drop on the pain scale, which averaged 71 out of 100 before the trial began.
The reduction in knee pain is not necessarily surprising. The more weight loaded on a joint, like the knee, the more significant the impact.
“Every extra pound you have over a healthy BMI is an extra 5 to 8 pounds of pressure on your knees… If you lose that weight, that will be a significant amount of pressure off of your knees,” said Dr. Daniel Wiznia, co-director of the Yale Medicine Avascular Necrosis & Osteonecrosis Program, per NBC.
It is also possible semaglutide has anti-inflammatory properties that help reduce pain outside of weight loss. However, Dr. David Felson, a professor of medicine at the Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine, says the improvement in pain is likely driven by the drop in body weight.
Dr. Wiznia believes semaglutide could be leveraged to help people attain a safe body weight before knee surgery or even reduce pain enough to skip the procedure altogether.
