Knee osteoarthritis is a very common ailment around the world, especially in the elderly, and addressing the pain it causes is key to improving patients’ lives and preventing potential disabilities. A new study carried out by Spanish researchers has investigated which of the possible treatment techniques, and combinations between them, could be the best for long-term pain relief.
The result of their work, Health, Musculoskeletal Pain, Neurological and Respiratory Pathology, Based on Rehabilitation, indicated that the combination of dry needling with hyaluronic acid was the best way to treat long-term pain in patients with knee osteoarthritis.
The tests to reach this conclusion, which has been released in the journal Environmental Research and Public Health, were performed on 60 people diagnosed with grade 3 osteoarthritis of the knee by MRI. The authors belong to the Physiotherapy degree at the Catholic University of Ávila (UCAV), in collaboration with researchers from the Catholic University of Valencia (UCV) and the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM).
Dry needling and hyaluronic acid, the best long-term option
The participants were divided into three groups, and in each of them the effects of three techniques for the treatment of this degenerative disease were compared: dry needling, hyaluronic acid and a combined treatment with ultrasound and quadriceps isometry.
After three months of pain follow-up, the researchers found that patients who had received dry needling and conventional treatment with ultrasound and isometry had a short-term improvement in the intensity of pain caused by the disease. However, the group that received injections of hyaluronic acid had the greatest reduction in long-term pain.
“There is also a significant difference in the improvement of knee function at different phases of the study in the various intervention groups. It seems that the combination of dry needling and hyaluronic acid in clinical practice is the best option for the treatment of osteoarthritis, but more studies with a larger sample size, more sessions and longer follow-up are needed”, they explain in the research.
.
