The effect of oral salmon calcitonin delivered with 5-CNAC on bone and cartilage degradation in osteoarthritic patients: a 14-day randomized study

What Was Tested

This randomized controlled trial paper looks at Calcitonin in the context of osteoarthritis, cartilage loss & avoiding joint replacement.

Who Took Part

The abstract describes 14 men taking part.

The age groups tagged for this paper are middle-aged adults and older adults, both men and women.

The study was a phase-I, 2-week, placebo-controlled, double-blind, double-dummy, randomized, gender-stratified study including 73 subjects aged 57-75 years.

Patients had painful OA with a Kellgren and Lawrence index score of I-III.

How the Study Was Run

In design terms this was a randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled study.

Because people in this Calcitonin study were split into groups at random, differences between the groups are less likely to reflect who happened to join each one.

As a double-blind Calcitonin study, the assignments were hidden from both participants and investigators until the end.

A placebo (an inactive look-alike) gave the Calcitonin group a baseline to be compared against.

A time span of 14 days appears in the methods.

Treatment was given twice daily for 14 days.

Study parameters were: plasma sCT levels, bone resorption by CTX-I (serum C-terminal telopeptide of collagen type I), bone formation by osteocalcin (serum OC), and cartilage degradation by CTX-II (urine C-terminal telopeptide of collagen type II) (clinicaltrials.gov identifier: NCT00486369).

What Was Measured

The subject headings attached to it are Area Under Curve, Bone Density Conservation Agents, Bone Resorption, Calcitonin, Carrier Proteins, Collagen Type I and Collagen Type II.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled study of Calcitonin in 14 men in people with osteoarthritis, cartilage loss & avoiding joint replacement over 14 days.

With fewer than 40 people, it is a small study, so it is better read as an early signal for further research than as a settled answer.

Its findings take up roughly 5 sentences of the abstract and are left out here on purpose; the source paper is the place to read them.

The publication is from 2010 (Osteoarthritis and cartilage), a journal based in England.

More context: the Calcitonin compound page, Osteoarthritis, cartilage loss & avoiding joint replacement research.