Copyright
©The Author(s) 2017. Published by Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved.
Glucosamine and chondroitin for the treatment of osteoarthritis
Haris S Vasiliadis, Orthopaedie Sonnenhof, 3006 Bern, Switzerland
Konstantinos Tsikopoulos, 1st Orthopaedic Department, 424 Army General Training Hospital, 56429 Thessaloniki, Greece
Author contributions: Both authors contributed to this paper.
Conflict-of-interest statement: The authors declare no conflict of interest.
Open-Access: This article is an open-access article which was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Correspondence to: Haris S Vasiliadis, MD, PhD, Orthopaedie Sonnenhof, Buchserstrasse 30, 3006 Bern, Switzerland. vasiliadismd@gmail.com
Telephone: +41-79-8883610
Received: July 22, 2016
Peer-review started: July 26, 2016
First decision: September 6, 2016
Revised: September 19, 2016
Accepted: October 17, 2016
Article in press: October 18, 2016
Published online: January 18, 2017
Peer-review started: July 26, 2016
First decision: September 6, 2016
Revised: September 19, 2016
Accepted: October 17, 2016
Article in press: October 18, 2016
Published online: January 18, 2017
Core Tip
Core tip: In this review we present and critically evaluate the current information regarding the administration of glucosamine (GL) and chondroitin (CH) for the treatment of knee or hip osteoarthritis. A clinical and radiological effect of GL and CH has been shown. However, only a few high quality trials exist. The effect sizes are small and probably not clinically relevant. The validity of these results is limited by high risk of bias introduced in the studies. Both GL and CH seem to be safe with no serious adverse events but there is currently no convincing information for their efficacy as treatment options in osteoarthritis.