So he says if patients want to continue taking glucosamine, they can do so knowing there is no real concern of side effects.
“Our findings suggest that glucosamine is not effective to treat chronic low back pain. However, if you’d like to give it a go for your low back pain, it is very safe and probably will not harm you,” Wilkens says.
And he says patients who take glucosamine and who have seen improvements with it should not stop taking it based on this study alone.
“There is some evidence pointing towards an effect for certain brands for knee osteoarthritis. Therefore, if you suffer from knee osteoarthritis it may be worth taking. However, if you do not experience any worthwhile effect in a six-month time period, you can probably stop taking it,” he explains.
Wilkens also says the jury is still out on chondroitin, a substance often added to glucosamine that many feel increases its effectiveness. “There is little research to support or reject this notion, so it is not possible from a scientific point of view to answer if a combination of glucosamine and chondroitin is better than glucosamine alone,” he explains.
He does say because this study looked at whether glucosamine can reduce low back pain if you already have it, future studies could try to determine if glucosamine can prevent development of chronic low back pain or be effective if taken for longer than a year.
Andrew L. Avins, MD, is a researcher at Northern California Kaiser-Permanente and a professor in the Departments of Medicine and Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of California, in San Francisco. He wrote an editorial accompanying this study saying the results are disheartening, but scientifically sound.
“Most of the time when we put promising therapies to the test, they fail. And this is yet another example. It’s very disappointing, of course, but the authors should be commended for doing solid work,” Dr. Avins says.
“The more we learn about what truly works and doesn’t, the better off we’ll be, and the faster we’ll get to a place where we have effective therapies to offer patients with lower back pain,” Dr. Avins adds.
