HERSHEY, Pa. — According to a press release sent out on Feb. 11, new research has revealed that a commonly used anti-depressant - paroxetine - can be used to treat osteoarthritis, a disease of the joints.
Osteoarthritis affects more than 30 million adults and is the fifth-leading cause of disability in the United States.
Research has shown that paroxetine inhibits the cellular pathway that leads to osteoarthritis. The scientists also found that the drug slows down cartilage degeneration while at the same time promotes cartilage health in both mice and human cartilage in vitro.
“Osteoarthritis destroys joint cartilage and results in pain and disability,” Fadia Kamal, assistant professor of orthopedics and rehabilitation at Penn State College of Medicine, said. “Patients live with this pain until their cartilage is extremely degenerated. Unfortunately, an invasive artificial joint replacement surgery is the only treatment orthopedists are currently able to offer. There has been a dire need to identify novel therapeutic targets, approaches or agents that can actively halt or reverse the osteoarthritis disease process.”
Kamal and her team found that like kidney and heart disease, osteoarthritis is caused by an uncontrolled growth of cartilage cells; how this process occurred has been a mystery, although research suggested that increased production and activity of a particular enzyme, G protein-coupled receptor kinase 2 (GRK2), had something to do with it.
Using this knowledge, Kamal and her team investigated how this enzyme behaved in osteoarthritis patients.
“We discovered a central role for GRK2 in cartilage degeneration, where GRK2 pushes the cartilage cells to destroy the cartilage surrounding them instead of replenishing and maintaining it," Kamal said. “In other words, the cells receive a bad signal to destroy cartilage.”
They came to the conclusion that this enzyme was linked to osteoarthritis using two experiments. In the final stages of their research they investigated how paroxetine, which is a potent GRK2 inhibitor, affected mice.
The results of Kamal's team's research were published in the journal Science Translational Medicine and the team are currently seeking approval from the FDA for a new trial of this drug to treat osteoarthritis.
