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Comment by thomassmith65 | Hacker News Reader

The title is misleading. It's not a "cure for Arthritis"; it's a pain killer.

"it restores protective processes to diseased joints and enables the regeneration of affected tissues. It works by blocking a compound that supports the nerve cells involved in transmitting pain signals to the brain."

Yes, I guess you could belittle that by calling it 'a painkiller'. No different at all to taking a handful of ibuprofen, which every arthritis sufferer knows enables regeneration and why it is a solved problem.

It's one thing to read an article one believes is wrong.

It's another thing to read, as we have here, a title that proclaims 'This is a Pipe' to an article that states 'This is not a pipe'

If it weren't a similar story with so many 'medical breakthrough' headlines, it would annoy less.

This is true, although it looks like in this case it may be more useful than just another pain killer, in that if you can reduce the joint pain, people might be more active, which may help them lose weight, which may reduce joint pain. If it's safe to take long term (reading between the lines, sounds like it might be compared to other pain killers), then it could have lasting impact on patients beyond them taking it, which is a good thing.

this is for OA, which means people dont have much joint left in the first place. That is what causes pain. not feeling pain will not turn them into marathon runners

Not quite.

> The drug is based on a molecule he discovered while working at Pfizer, and can be delivered via a once-a-month EpiPen-style injection, where it restores protective processes to diseased joints and enables the regeneration of affected tissues. It works by blocking a compound that supports the nerve cells involved in transmitting pain signals to the brain.

The mechanism might be to affect the nerve cells involved in pain signaling, but the effect is to actually help regenerate tissue.

Fantastic, but the title is still misleading.

  > It is hoped the drug — which is not a cure but will make the condition much less painful for sufferers [...]

> enables the regeneration of affected tissues

This needs some heavy scrutiny, it seems like this is related to tanezumab. Which yes, blocks pain by affectively sticking a lego in front of another lego that when connected says hey I'm hurt, but doesn't pro-actively heal anything as far as I'm aware.

The usual play with claims like this is that with reduced inflammation there might be a better chance of circulation allowing for better natural regeneration (somewhat true?). But active regeneration of damaged tissue especially in places typically afflicted with athritis is a bit more complex because it's often at osteochondral boundry layers aren't as vascularized.

As a youngish sufferer of osteoarthritis in my foot I had my hopes up, however there is no mention of cartilage or bone in the article.

The “cure” for osteoarthritis would need to regenerate or replace damaged or missing cartilage, a seemingly impossible task from my limited understanding.

Two patients can have identical knee x-rays/MRIs - loss of joint space and osteophyte formation etc. But one has pain and the other does not. Do they both have osteoarthritis? They clearly don't have the same dis-ease.

Patient don't care about having cartilage or bone sclerosis or subchondral cyst formation; they care about pain that stops them moving (which in turn can increase their weight further exacerbating the joint issues).

So, osteoarthritis is a problem in that it causes pain. If something specifically reduces osteoarthritic pain, I am okay with it saying it 'beats' the dis-ease.

The issue that people have here is whether being a pain-killer merely masks the disease temporarily and leads to people ignoring the problem and hence aggravating the disease even more. Pain is usually a signal of a real and valid problem.

I am merely explaining what the issue at hand is - I am not saying that is what the proposed medicine does. Another way to say it, is the compound treating the symptom or the problem - or perhaps both.

Imagine you have a hernia that hurts and you take medicine that masks that pain, do you still have hernia?

i just did a s/cure/beat/ on the title. Possibly the original article changed its headline; they do that sometimes.

Edit: yup - https://web.archive.org/web/20240811063000/https://www.theti...

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