Intra-Articular Corticosteroid Injections have long term pain relief benefit among Osteoarthritis patients, claims study
Researchers have found in a new study that intra-articular steroid injections were associated with a reduced need for opioids, both alone and in combination products among osteoarthritis patients.
This benefit was observed for injections into the hip, shoulder, hand, and knee. British patients who received these injections showed decreased usage of opioid-containing drugs and other painkillers for years afterwards.
A study was done to estimate the effect of intra-articular corticosteroid injection (IACI) for osteoarthritis on longer-term incidence of pain medications.
They conducted a cohort study of patients registered in the UK Clinical Practice Research Datalink (CPRD) GOLD primary care database with an incident diagnosis of knee, hip, hand, or shoulder osteoarthritis between 2005–2019. Exposure of interest was single or repeated use of IACI (analysed separately). Main outcome measures were five-year incidence of uncombined opioids, opioid-nonopioid analgesic combinations, oral corticosteroids, paracetamol, oral Non-Steroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drugs (NSAIDs), and topical NSAIDs. Instrumental Variable (IV) analysis was used given this methodology can account for strong and unmeasured confounding. Secondary analyses used propensity-score matching and Cox regression.
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