Prevention And Treatment Of Osteoarthritis

Osteoarthritis is a kind of chronic progressive degenerative disease of the bone and joint, which mainly suffers both the middle-aged and the old-aged and is characterized by the degenerative articular cartilage that is primarily caused by both the necrosis and apoptosis of the articular cartilage cells. It is very effective to treat osteoarthritis by the multipurpose therapy of TCM (traditional Chinese medicine) and western medicine. Firstly, the paper sums up the research progress on the treatment over recent years. And it can be concluded that TCM therapy can improves the patient's conditions by reducing the pain, swelling, function of the joints, through the antiapoptosis effect of the herbs on the apoptosis of (the articular cartilage cells, promoting the plerosis of articualr cartilage cells. The therapy of the western medicne is very effective in improving the conditions accompanied by the severe side effect and sorts of complications. But along with the development of the protective agent of articular cartilage, cyclooxygenase-2 (COX-2) and surgical techniques, the western medicine therapy of osteoarthritis has a good outlook. Perhaps the osteoarthritis can be cured completely by application of the gene transfection and tissue engineering of articular cartilage cells in the late future. Secondly, the paper briefly introduces Professor Zeng Yilin's special and long-term clinical experience of treating osteoarthritis by Chinese herbs and his opinions on the disease through the combination of TCM differentiation and modern diagnosis.