FUNCTIONAL MEDICINE BLOG
Includes over 800 monographs reporting on emerging studies in the medical and scientific literature of practical clinical importance, easily searched for content.
Osteoarthritis: auto-inflammation, IL-17 and the microbiome
Osteoarthritis is an autoinflammatory condition characterized by a more aggressive inflammatory response to stressed or damaged tissue, with a subset exhibiting high IL-17 activity, a hallmark of autoimmunity. This may be ameliorated by regulating the autoinflammatory response through manipulation of the gut microbiome.
Lyme update: does longer-term antibiotic therapy help?
"Patients with subjective, vexing symptoms attributed to Lyme disease should not anticipate that even longer courses of antibiotics will produce relief, a finding that is in concert with results from previous trials."
Circadian rhythms of inflammation
Treatment of chronic inflammation can be enhanced and adrenal suppression minimized by circadian dosing of anti-inflammatory medication.
Pain chronic after injury, surgery due to neuroinflammation
"...the transition from acute physiological pain to persistent pain involves low-grade inflammation in the central nervous system (CNS), glial dysfunction and subsequently an imbalance in the neuron–glial interaction that causes enhanced and prolonged pain transmission."
Gout: updates in diagnosis and treatment
Gout diagnosis is rendered less invasive and more practical in the general clinical setting and treatment more sustainable by recent advances.
Tennis elbow and sciatica are not helped by corticosteroid injections
Among patients with chronic unilateral lateral epicondylalgia, the use of corticosteroid injection vs placebo injection resulted in worse clinical outcomes after 1 year, and physiotherapy did not result in any significant differences. The available evidence suggests that epidural corticosteroid injections offer only short-term relief of leg pain and disability for patients with sciatica. The small size of the treatment effects, however, raises questions about the clinical utility of this procedure in the target population.
Anemia due to hypothyroid
Even subclinical hypothyroid (reduced systemic thyroid effect despite normal lab results) has far-reaching consequences because the ability of every cell in the body to do its work is diminished. A study just published in the European Journal of Internal Medicine further confirms that hypothyroid can be a cause of anemia.
Osteoarthritis is an inflammatory disorder driven by complement
Osteoarthritis is an inflammatory disorder driven by the complement system, a part of the innate immune system.