Efficacy and safety of plant-derived products for the treatment of osteoarthritis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: Plant-derived therapies are traditionally used as medicines, but they have generally not been studied with the same rigor as pharmaceutical agents. This review summarizes the use of plant-derived products for osteoarthritis. Methods: Sixty-three identified trials were summarized for pain, function, and safety outcomes using standardized mean differences (SMDs) and relative risks. Results: Plant-derived therapies are effective for treating pain compared to placebo, as assessed using visual analog scores and numerical rating scales (SMD, 1.08; 95% confidence interval [CI]: 0.72–1.44), or Western Ontario and McMaster University Osteoarthritis Index (WOMAC)/Knee injury and Osteoarthritis Outcome Score (KOOS) pain scales (SMD, 0.98; 95% CI: 0.62–1.35). Classes demonstrating overall efficacy in more than one trial for either visual analog scores or WOMAC pain included Boswellia serrata , capsaicin, and ginger; there was single-trial evidence of the efficacy of another nine agents. Plant-derived therapies have similar efficacy to an active comparator (SMD, 0.32; P =0.08; -0.08; P =0.14). Therapies are also effective for functional outcomes compared to placebo (SMD, 0.92; P <0.001). However, significant heterogeneity remains for all pain and function outcomes, indicating that the results need to be interpreted with caution. Risk of adverse events was similar to placebo (relative risk =1.13; P =0.1), but reduced compared to an active comparator (relative risk, 0.75; P <0.001). Conclusion: Plant-derived therapies may be efficacious in treating osteoarthritic pain and functional limitations, and they appear to be safer than other active therapies. However, quality trials and long-term data are lacking, and the number of trials for each therapy is limited. Comparisons would be assisted by trial standardization. Keywords: phytotherapy, plant extract, herbal, review, meta-analysis, osteoarthritis
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".