New Way to Tackle Arthritis at its Source

Arthritis and other inflammatory joint diseases come in different forms, all requiring slightly different treatments.

In addition, because arthritis is a progressive disease, it gets worse the longer it continues. The most effective remedies are those that start the soonest because they can slow the disease down before it really takes hold.

Unfortunately, after sufferers had ignored the first symptoms for a year or two and the doctors have taken months to make a correct diagnosis, the disease is usually already underway.

Scientists from the University of Warwick now think they have a solution in the form of a blood test that can accurately diagnose arthritis at its onset and distinguish various forms of arthritis and joint disease from each other.

At present, the only test that can diagnose osteoarthritis is an MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) scan which is first, not terribly accurate when these diseases are at their onset, and second, quite expensive to perform on every person that complains about symptoms.

Similarly, the only presently available test for rheumatoid arthritis is called an anti-cyclic citrullinated peptide (CCP) antibody test, which is also inaccurate at the disease’s onset.

The Warwick team recruited 225 study subjects, some with osteoarthritis, some with rheumatoid arthritis, some with other inflammatory joint diseases, and some with healthy joints. They focused on knee joints specifically and published the results in the journal Arthritis Research and Therapy.

They used mass spectrometry to analyze blood and synovial fluid from their subjects’ knee joints, looking for damaged or modified proteins.

To be more technical, they found that these proteins were damaged by oxidation, nitration, and glycation, which they managed to measure in the fluid they collected as oxidized, nitrated, and glycated amino acids.

The proteins of people with joint diseases were damaged in this way, while those with healthy joints had no such damage.

Furthermore, the exact nature of the damage differed from one joint disease to another, making it easy to distinguish them from each other.

This blood test has a slightly higher sensitivity and specificity for the diagnosis of these diseases.

Sensitivity is a measurement’s ability to rule out the wrong diseases, and specificity is its ability to rule in the right diseases.

For osteoarthritis in its earliest stage, the blood test had a sensitivity of 92 percent and a specificity of 90 percent, giving it a slight advantage over an MRI scan with its sensitivity of 70 percent and specificity of 90 percent.

For all these reasons, this new blood test is a vast improvement over the existing diagnostic methods and, according to the researchers, it can be available within the next two years.

But diagnosis is not enough, we also want to cure it.

Fortunately, here is a simple, easy, 3-step approach that completely reversed my arthritis and has done the same for thousands of readers – usually within 28 days…